


Time Twisters

by amelia



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Alien Technology, Awesome Toshiko Sato, F/F, F/M, Future, Hints of Tosh/Gwen, Ianto's an adorable archivist, Jack haunted by old love affairs, Jack's Past, M/M, Mystery, Past Relationship(s), Rift (Torchwood), TARDIS Coral, The Doctor has good intentions but things go wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-01
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-14 03:45:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 34,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1251565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amelia/pseuds/amelia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A mystery unfolds when a young Cardiff boy is bit by two alien birds, and PC Andy picks up a strange metal box by the side of the road.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: The Artiste

Prologue: The Artiste

“It’s coming!” from his arm chair, Arthur Derbyshire had left off his word puzzles and was holding his arm upright, studying the sway of his twisted fingers. 

“Thunderstorm’s on its way, all right,” agreed Nurse Jane Whitman, folding the pillowcases and towels nearby.

“It’s the headache,” Derbyshire croaked. “I’ve got to paint.” His fingers held a special power: they could sense something electric in the air. It was psychic. It was erotic. 

The nurse sighed. “It’s the weather, the air pressure, love. Brings on your migraines.” She left off her laundry folding and made her way over to the old man, limping cautiously on her ruined knee. “Let’s get you to bed, then, shall we? The laundry’ll wait, I’m sure.” 

She spoke to him like a spinster might talk to her cats. Old Derby was still holding up his arm at a strange angle, as if pondering the balance of his life hanging there, between the days he’d been young, and the days to come when he’d meet his maker. 

Nurse Whitman had worked at the care center nearly 15 years and was used to old men and their fits like these. “What’ll you paint today, then?”

“It’s the future, I can see it. A beach, and a man, standing, just there in a dark suit.”

“I’m sure he’ll wait for us to get your paints together.” The nurse readied his chair, then helped him into it. She kept an eye on the other old coots at the care center. Old Mrs. Samuel was reading her Digest, while Mr. Andrews held court over the card table, telling stories. 

“You never know,” Derby mused. “Perhaps I’m only recording the future, but what if it has to be painted? If it changes things?”

“What if it doesn’t change them for the better?” asked Nurse Whitman. “How will you know?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, only that I’ve got to get it out of my fingers,” Derby frowned, still studying his hands as the nurse wheeled him down the hall and past the common room.

Other patients’ voices floated by. “Can we get a cat, Ma?” Mr. Eli was asking from his reclining chair by the window. 

“When you’re older, dear,” his wife answered, without lifting her eyes from her knitting. Usually the home would send away patients whose marbles had gone missing, but Mrs. Eli had her husband’s carefully tucked away for safekeeping. 

With Derbyshire settled into his bed, Nurse Whitman went rooting around in his closets for supplies. “Set it up right here, like usual,” Derby directed her.

Most of the patients’ wardrobes held a change of everyday clothes, a good wool suit or dress, and a good pair of shoes. They kept boxes of keepsakes and albums of photographs. But Derby’s closet smelled like paint thinner and canvas instead of moth balls. He had no fine clothing or a pension to buy it with. He’d been too flighty and focused on being an artiste in his youth to hold down a regular job.

What he did have was a patron. A Mr. Wood had set up a trust fund that paid for Arthur Derbyshire’s care and expenses. Mr. Wood never visited, but the funding kept Derby’s closet stocked with canvases, good sable brushes, and shoeboxes stuffed with paint tubes. 

Derbyshire’s best tantrums were over the glass jars and yogurt cups that he kept for mixing paint and dipping his brushes. He wouldn’t see a single jar tossed in out in the bin without a fight. He was petulant and disagreeable now, but he must once have been dashing, a bloke that Jane Whitman might have fancied when she was a young duckling of twenty-five. 

Now, as she was fond of repeating to the interns, you couldn’t begrudge an old man his delusions if they kept him sane. So she humored him, setting up his painting supplies. She rolled out the easel that hung over his bed, and set up a clean, pre-gessoed canvas. On a meal tray, she set out a yogurt cup of water, along with a former pickle jar bristling with brushes. Beside that, there was the tray piled with paint tubes, arranged as neatly as surgeon’s scalpels.

Derby’s fingers settled in them immediately, sifting through his supplies, searching out the right colors. She watched him lift up each of the brushes to the light with a trembling wrist, to inspect the quality of the bristles and whether they’d been properly cleaned. Then, as he pursed his lips and brandished a palette tray, Nurse Whitman quietly stepped out and left him to his work.


	2. For the Birds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gwen's caught in a traffic jam and finds herself hunting two stray birds.

For the Birds 

Heavy droplets of rain pelted the windshield in front of Gwen’s eyes. The beams of the car headlights ahead of her splattered into kaleidoscopic patterns across the glass. Gwen sighed at the traffic and rain and reached for her earpiece.

“Hello?” Clarice’s voice carried through with the static of the rain, and Gwen smiled at the familiar tone.

“Hi, it’s Gwen,” Gwen said, “Sorry I missed the girls’ night last night. I had to help Rhys pack for his aunt’s birthday and family reunion.”

“Are you headed off to Leadworth then?” There was a clatter on the other end, like coffee cups on a table, and the rustle of voices.

“Oh, no!” Gwen said, “I’ve dropped him off. He’s going to cook their birthday dinner, but I haven’t got the time off work, so I’ve escaped playing sous chef.” 

“Well, if you’re invitin’ me out for the night to celebrate your freedom, the answer’s no. I’ve got a right mess of a hangover.”

“Not tonight,” Gwen agreed. “Actually, I thought I’d be glad for freedom, but now I just feel guilty.” 

“Well, you should,” Clarice clucked. “You missed one hell of a night. All this gossip to catch you up on. Diana and her girlfriend are trying to get pregnant again. They’re taking this yoga class, trying to convince their teacher to be the sperm donor.”

“All right, how’s that going?” 

“Well, let me tell you…” 

The rain had been coming down hard, weaving in long spirals on her windshield, and Gwen zoned out, listening to Clarice’s voice chatter on. But the words faded out, as a bright light and the sound of a car skidding brought her attention rushing back to the road. 

A car in front of her was stopped. Gwen slammed down hard on the brakes. Her breath caught in her throat, and her car careened forward, weaving back and forth in the lane as it skidded. 

She lurched to a halt just barely in time, but her heart was still pounding. “Clarice? I have to go, there’s an accident ahead.”

She hung up abruptly. She’d worry about Clarice’s reaction later. Now, Gwen pressed a hand to her throbbing chest, willing her heart to calm down. 

 

\--

 

PC Andrew Davidson pulled his police vehicle up behind the ambulance that was stuck on the narrow shoulder of the road, and climbed out, cursing. “Sodding traffic! Bloody rain!” 

The highway was a mess, two lanes of traffic stalled. Half the cars weren’t even in their lanes, all trying to get into the next lane over, hoping to bypass the accident. Perhaps the rain was a blessing, after all—if it hadn’t been so wet out, half the people would probably be milling around chatting and having a smoke, and they’d never be able to restore order. 

Cars honked and engines rumbled, the sound vibrating in the wet atmosphere. Andy was grateful he’d put on galoshes and a second pair of wool socks, and his feet stayed dry as water splashed around him. He picked his way around the ambulance at the edge of the road. Littering the shoulder were rocks and old tire treads. On a higher patch of ground, some metal debris glinted in the dull afternoon light like a lost mobile phone. Andy bent to pick it up. It must have fallen out of a car, and he’d turn it in to lost and found at the station. 

He stuffed it in his pocket and tried to assess the scene. Two ambulances were parked alongside each other, and a group of emergency responders stood with a woman and a young boy. There had been a call, something about a child bitten by a bird. He saw no sign of other accidents, despite the stalled traffic. 

Beyond the ambulance, Andy saw a dark, sleek SUV sitting like a fat rain cloud in the middle of the highway. It blocked two lanes of traffic, and cars were honking, while some drivers just milled about in the road. Standing beside the offending vehicle was the figure of Andy’s nemesis, Captain Jack Harkness, in his imposing coat.

Nemesis might be too strong a word, but Andy was secretly tired of dealing with the leader of the Torchwood Institute and his imperious attitude, especially now that Andy’s former partner Gwen had joined Jack’s team and started treating police with the same dismissive air. 

"Bloody hell, Torchwood!” Andy called, glad to have someone to vent his frustration on. “You can't just block traffic.”

The Captain turned, surprised. "I just did." He gave Andy a teasing smile. 

Another lad dressed in a dark suit stood by Jack’s elbow. “Hello, Andrew.”

“Well,” Andy opened his mouth to tell them both off, but before he got another word out, he caught sight of Gwen herself, walking up from between the rows of stalled vehicles. “What’s going on, then?” he asked instead. “What’s she doing?” 

Gwen held up her arms and he saw two white sacks hanging from her hands. “Give us a hand here,” she called. 

The young Torchwood lad broke away from Jack’s side and went to help her. “Thanks, Ianto,” she told him. “Just one evening without Torchwood, is that too much to ask?" 

“Gwen Cooper, voted for the Torchwood yearbook as the most likely to be in the wrong place at the right time.” Ianto gave her a dry smile and lifted one of the sacks from her hands. 

Andy trailed behind as they walked toward the SUV, peering at what they held. He remembered, now, meeting Ianto. The man was always at Jack’s side, a quieter admin-type compared with Torchwood’s usual bluster, though just as pretentious in his 3-piece suit. What was he doing carrying soggy flour sacks in a suit, anyway? Squinting for a closer look, Andy noticed they had beaks and legs.

“Hold on,” Andy tried to get in front, but Ianto and Jack were both broad men. “Are those birds? Did you just shoot a pair of seagulls by the highway?”

“Looks like we did. Caught them for reckless driving.” Jack unfolded a plain white sheet to drape across the interior of the trunk, and Ianto and Gwen placed the birds on top of it, then wrapped them up in the cloth. Andy had to admire their efficiency. 

“Was it really necessary to shoot them?” Ianto asked Gwen, echoing the next question Andy wanted to ask, as they watched blue stains spread across the clean white cotton.

“Weren’t you going to?” Jack said.

Ianto just rolled his eyes. “Just stun them, that’s all.” 

“Don’t tell me you wanted to keep them as friends for Myfanwy,” Jack said.

“Or snacks,” Gwen added.

“Look,” Andy broke in to their conversation. “Animal control was called in to handle this. They could use the break after weeks of rescuing wet cats up trees.” 

Jack huffed. “Yeah, why don’t you go talk to them?” 

“We could have studied them, alive,” Ianto said, ignoring Andy entirely.

“Owen can do a necropsy,” Jack told him. “We’ll go hunting some other time, hey?” 

“That’s not the point.” Ianto flashed a look at Jack, which Andy couldn’t interpret. 

“Right,” Gwen sighed. “I’m calling a lorry to tow my car. Meet you back at the Hub. And no shenanigans, hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jack answered.

Gwen smacked his arm, and stalked off to find her car in the chaos around them. 

Andy didn’t budge. As Jack moved back toward the driver’s side, the PC stood in his way. “Wait a second. What do we put on the police report?”

Jack just swept passed him, but Ianto turned and smiled. “Traffic accidents.”

“Don’t think so, mate,” Andy said. Frustrated, he pulled out the phone he’d picked up by the side of the road and started fumbling it back and forth between his hands. “Those birds bit a kid. They were flapping all around and then bit down, held on, and it took 10 minutes to shake the beastly thing off, from what I heard. The boy’s being sent to hospital now, look.” 

He gestured toward the ambulance parked on the side of the road. Two emergency responders in prim blue uniforms hovered around a young boy, maybe 10 years old, as his mother paced nearby.

“Tell them some birds escaped from a zoo.” Jack had come back around to face him. “And we’ll take that.” 

“Hey, that belongs to someone,” Andy exclaimed, as Jack plucked the object from his fingers. But then he looked down and saw it wasn’t a phone after all, just a metal box. 

“Found on the side of the road?” Jack’s eyes caught the light, flashing like thunder. “Some kind of tech? Fell through with the birds, maybe?”

Andy threw his hands in the air. “Well yes, I just picked it up, but it’s just a square. I don’t know. Thing.”

“Now it’s Torchwood’s Square Thing,” Jack called over his shoulder, walking away.

“Arrogant sod.” Andy made a face at the heavy wool coat disappearing into the driver’s seat. “I really don’t like him.”

“Sometimes, none of us do,” Ianto agreed. He pulled a card from his jacket pocket. “If the boy has any lasting injuries, call us?” 

“Right, I suppose.” 

Ianto moved past him and climbed in the SUV, and Andy watched the vehicle roar to life and force its way through the traffic tangle. Bumpers scraped, drivers honked and threw up their hands. A woman in a green sedan tried to reverse and only succeeded in hitting the van behind her. Finally the SUV lumbered up the shoulder of the road, and disappeared around the ambulance. 

Andy sighed and turned away to consult with the paramedics. There would be angry drivers’ statements to take, too, before he could get in out of the rain.


	3. Seagulls and Other Ephemera

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Further mysteries unwrapped, enigmas uncovered, and quiet moments.

The cog doors squealed at the entrance to the Hub, as Jack burst in. “Doctor Harper!” 

His voice echoed across the bare concrete and metal walls, and the two remaining Torchwood agents, Owen and Toshiko, turned to stare at him from their workstations. Jack’s voice seemed impossibly loud after the quiet they’d been working in.

“Funny thing!” Jack continued. “A hunter shot two rabid sea gulls by the freeway today. We brought you some new test subjects.” 

Ianto stepped in by Jack’s shoulder and lifted the white sheet holding the birds. Their blood had seeped into the fabric, leaving a blue stain bleeding through the fibers like ink. 

“Gull populations have doubled or so in the last few years,” Ianto mused. “Maybe it’s an alien plot.”

“They bit a kid,” Jack explained. “Lucky Gwen got there before they did more damage.”

“I’m not a vet, Jack,” Owen sighed. He set down the equipment he’d been working with and came over to take a look.

“And these aren’t seagulls,” Jack replied. “But as our medical officer, I need you to do a necropsy. Make sure the child they bit isn’t infected with some alien plague.” 

“Right, over here.” Owen led them down to his medical station, the small room lined with tile and medical devices. He shifted the tall, goose-necked lamps over the metal autopsy table, as Ianto unwrapped the birds and laid them out. 

“Some type of shorebird,” Owen said, looking them over as he snapped on latex gloves. “See the long beaks and those long legs.” 

Jack and Ianto took their first good look at the birds as the wrappings fell away. They were white and grey with sleek, slim bodies, yellow beaks and legs. The birds were resting in their own blood, leaving the feathers stained and matted, and the long neck plumes were smashed and crooked where they’d fell. The legs too stood out at odd angles, broken in the fall. 

“They look like cranes,” said Toshiko, remembering the birds on the Japanese shore from her childhood. “But not quite the right shape.”

“Give me some space,” Owen said, pulling out a drawer of tools. “I’ll open them up and take a poke about. Jack, that Singularity scalpel fix will have to wait.”

“That reminds me,” Jack reached in his coat pocket. “Toshiko, found you a toy, too. We think it fell through the Rift with the birds.” He handed her the metal cube that he’d plucked off Andy. Tosh turned it in her fingers and felt the ridges and grooves on the surface. Each of its metal faces caught the light, flashing like mirrors. 

“It’s electronics, alien origin,” Jack said. “See if you can fix it.”

Toshiko traced her fingers along the electrical pathways etched in the surface. “I’ll try, but these look badly damaged.” 

“Do what you can.” Jack turned around. “And Ianto—“

“Yep, making coffee.” Ianto was already headed back up the stairs. 

Tosh and Jack followed him. Toshiko went to take a closer look at the cube through her magnifying lenses, and Jack trailed Ianto over to his station. Nestled between the alien terrariums and his computer gadgetry, his fingers set to work over the espresso machine, scooping in the grounds, clicking the filter in place, and watching the gauge as he set it in motion. 

Jack looked around to find Owen and Toshiko busy with their tasks. With the moment of privacy, he leaned into Ianto’s personal space, put a hand on his hip, and rubbed his nose against Ianto’s ear. He caught Toshiko’s eye as she flickered a smile their way.

“Here you are.” Ianto handed Jack the little cup of espresso. 

“Mmm,” Jack hummed, taking the cup from Ianto’s hands. “I wasn’t asking for coffee, though.” 

“It’s not really the time.” Ianto glanced around uncomfortably. Their morning plans had been interrupted, but was Jack really coming onto him now, here, in the middle of the Hub? He took a step backward, his hands connecting with the edge of the counter. He didn’t dare look but he could feel Tosh watching them.

Jack just raised an eyebrow. “Was hoping you could break out your research skills,” he explained. “You know, see if Torchwood’s ever seen similar birds before, and if that kid’s likely to have any lasting damage?”

“Of course, sir,” Ianto felt a hot flush in his cheeks. It was awkward to always be guessing whether Jack was asking for something personal or professional. “I’ll get on that right away.” 

He turned back to his computer, and Jack reached around him, putting the empty cup next to a pile of others to be washed. “Make sure you do,” he said, another puff of hot breath grazing Ianto’s neck.

\----

 

Gwen’s hair was nearly dry when she finally made it back to the Hub. She found the main floor deserted, but the clatter and clang of metal tools led her over to the balcony above Owen’s medical alcove. 

For a minute, she watched him working. His wiry frame bent over the table as he peered in a microscope. The birds were splayed out on the autopsy tables behind him, pinned and gutted. Numbers and data flashed through his computer screen, processing and running some kind of analysis. Owen’s dark hair was tousled at the back, where he sometimes tugged it while concentrating. 

“I’ve made it back in one piece,” she called to him. “Have you found anything?”

“You made it in today after all, hmm?” Owen plucked something off a petri dish and twirled it in his fingers. It was white, bristly. “Ever looked at a feather through a microscope?” he twirled around on the chair to face her, brandishing the feather.

Gwen came down the steps toward him, and reached back in her mind to her school days. She’d liked science and done microscope labs. Then there was that squid dissection and the cow eyes. But anything less gory was also less memorable. “Maybe, why?” she asked.

Owen grinned at her. Even though they’d broken off their affair, sometimes they still had these moments. It was almost flirting. Either that, or he just liked showing off. 

He turned back to the computer and plugged something in, and the microscope’s view appeared on screen. “Two-hundred times magnification. See all these barbs, interlocking?” 

She leaned over near him to get a better look. In 200x detail, a tiny cross-section of the feather looked like rows of small plastic rods extending from a larger shaft like branches on a tree, all tangled and twisted around each other. “Yes?” she prompted him.

“Birds can fly, because the barbs tangle and block the airflow,” Owen explained. “They’re usually made of a type of fibrous protein called keratin. But in this case, these feathers have high silicate concentrations in their feathers.”

“So?” Gwen didn’t know what on Earth he was on about.

“Most of life on Earth today is carbon-based, but some of the world’s oldest plants and critters also use silicon dioxide as a structural material.”

“So they’re made of prehistoric metals?” She picked up the feather itself, but it didn’t look all that unusual. 

“Not quite,” Owen shrugged. “First off, they’re not prehistoric, since they’re not from Earth at all. Secondly, they’re metalloids, which are typically found in our bodies. If a bloke weighed, say 100 kilos, he probably have about 15 grams of silicone in him right now.”

“So it’s not toxic?” Gwen concluded. “Nothing that could harm the boy they bit?”

“If any of the silicates entered the blood stream, if they’re broken out in tiny crystals like asbestos, they could cause tiny cuts and disease, but I wouldn’t expect a reaction this quickly.” Owen shrugged. “He’d probably in the clear.”

“The medics thought the bite might be infected, though,” Gwen told him, “They’ve taken the boy in for observation. He’s only nine years old. I got photos.” On her phone, she pulled up photos to show him of the small, red bite marks along the boy’s shoulder. They were clean marks, scabbing over. 

“There are some rare flesh diseases,” Owen said, considering the possibilities. “But the likelihood of his arm falling off is fairly low, I’d say.” 

He was trying to make a joke, and Gwen punched his arm lightly but didn’t feel reassured.

“Gwen!” Ianto’s voice carried over the balcony, with his homely Welsh accent. “I’ve just made coffee, if you want some fresh.”

“Oh, you’re a blessing,” she told him. She tossed a smile at Owen, and left him to his work. Upstairs, Ianto pressed a steaming mug into her hands. 

“Welcome back in from the rain,” he offered. 

“Lovely, thanks.” Her mug was warm, and she shivered, still feeling damp and cold from the long morning. “Did you notice anything odd when you were out there? Anything about where those birds might have come from?” 

“The sky was the wrong shade,” Ianto tilted his head, thoughtfully, “Sort of a purple cloud. Other than that, just the traffic. I reckon they came through the rift and got confused. ”

Gwen sighed and leaned against the desk, breathing in the hot steam. “Would you believe it’s almost five hundred quid to tow my car home, through that traffic tangle?” 

“Submit an expense report,” Ianto advised. “I’ll get Jack to sign it.” He turned to wiping a towel down the row of mugs and over the espresso machine. “Oh, there’s one other thing we found, a sort of alien box.”

\----

 

Ianto led Gwen up to the conference room next, where they found Toshiko madly scribbling on diagrams she’d pinned to the wall. They were large, plotter-printed black-and-white diagrams of circuitry and debris, all gobs and skinny lines of black ink. 

“Artsy,” Ianto noted. “A sort of Jackson Pollock, dot-matrix, post-post-modernist fusion.”

Gwen snickered. “Didn’t know you’d studied art.”

Ianto shook his head. He hadn’t.

Tosh explained what they were looking at. “These are scans from each surface of the cube. Like a map of the circuitry, so I can diagram it and mark it for repairs.” 

Gwen and Ianto looked over her shoulder at the diagrams. “It looks like a post-apocalyptic city,” said Gwen.

“It fell from some height,” Tosh agreed. The images showed tiny roads, electronic pathways cut in even lines across the faces of the cube. There were blocks and boxes, cylinders and other components that looked like buildings and structures. It looked like some monster had come down to crush and stomp whole city blocks, leaving the roads and rivers in rubble. 

And so, like an architect and city planner, Tosh was penciling in the surface streets and the sites for new skyscrapers and gardens to be built. Her notes were lines and numbers, recording possible functions and components, the voltage and resistance of each path in her thin, angular script.

“There are these series of regulators,” Tosh used the back of her pencil to show the pathways she was reconstructing. “From what I can tell, the voltage can be controlled and directed to the center panel at the face of each of these cubes.” 

“Like a laser beam?” Gwen guessed. 

“I think it’s dispersed in a wave, like a sound wave,” Tosh frowned at the diagrams. “But if I repair it wrong, it might not work. It may do something entirely different.” 

“Just don’t blow up the Hub by accident,” requested Gwen. 

“Or the coffee mugs,” noted Ianto. “I’ve replaced four this week while Owen tunes that scalpel machine.”

“I’m not Owen, and anyway, no danger of that now,” Tosh said. “I can’t even find a power source. No batteries or photovoltaic cells. No induction coils to capture mechanical energy, like those flashlights you could shake. Unless there’s something hidden inside, which I wouldn’t know how to activate. I’m a bit stuck.”

“But if it has capacitors, it could store energy.” Ianto had learned a little about electronics from Toshiko. He wandered over to the table. The cube itself was just a lump of metal under Toshiko’s large magnifying lens, and he picked it up and peered down at it. 

Gwen joined him. “It’s quite marvelous, really,” she noted. “There aren’t any seams or welds. It’s just one fused piece.”

They heard boots clomping up the stairs and then Jack appeared at the door. “What did you do, stop for lunch on your way in? Did you bring enough for the rest of us?” he teased Gwen.

“So Tosh gets a puzzle, and Owen’s got those birds,” she said. “Don’t I get anything?” 

Her ringing phone interrupted them. “You’ve got a phone call,” Jack pointed out.

Gwen rolled her eyes and walked out of the conference room. “Andy?” she answered. “Yes? …You sure? …Yes, we’ll be right there… No, you didn’t make a mistake calling us. Okay, text the address. Thanks.”

“Is the kid worse?” Jack had followed her out of the room.

“Not that,” Gwen shook her head. “They’ve found a woman, unconscious in the street. She doesn’t match any missing persons records. Andy had a feeling it’s one of ours.” 

Jack nodded. “Take Owen and go,” he told her. “The birds can wait.” 

 

\----

 

There was a sepia photograph in one of the files that Ianto kept returning to. It was the stern face of Jack Harkness, dressed in a tweed vest, with shirt-sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He was leaning on a cart in front of a dirt road. The details of his face were burned out in white tones, but Ianto could fill in the missing details. He knew the shape of Jack’s cheeks, the wrinkles in the corner of his lips, and the particular red shade of those lips masked by sepia. 

The photograph must have been from the early 1900s, judging by the man’s outfit and the illegible pencil scrawl on the back of the yellowed paper. Ianto had found it along with other ephemera in his ongoing task to organize the archives. He wanted to scan old documents, and tag the paper records in the database so they could be found again, and sometimes he stumbled on these treasures that brought him back in time and made his breath catch in his chest. 

Right now, it was almost useless to search through the paper files for anything related to their active cases. There was just too many folders, stuffed with ephemera like tickets, case reports, sketches and photos. They were fascinating, but Ianto was more likely to find something in the electronic database.

He was running a search right now on his laptop for shorebirds and alien birds, and he was only thumbing through the file cabinets while he waited. The only sounds in the archives deep below the Hub were the buzzing fan of his laptop and the hum of the lights. Ianto’s dress shoes scuffed the floor, kicking up swirls of dust, and he covered his mouth and tried not to breathe as he moved. 

These records like the photograph he’d found were like secrets stored deep below the bowels of the Hub. They were puzzle pieces to the lives of Torchwood agents before him, some of whom must have been part of Jack’s past lives. And they were strange, beguiling accounts of alien life and the supernatural. 

Ianto recognized the Captain’s own writing in some of the reports and photographs, with references that only Jack himself might have understood:

* “Looks like a keypad from the 22nd century. Fusion processor. Function unknown.”   
* “Advanced Cyrillic script, QuarterCore Galaxy Sector, circa 40-45th century. The log details the ship’s horticultural efforts, recipes for favorite cuisine.”  
* “Contemporary ritual sword forged by Wegaroo warriors. Do not touch buttons, may explode.”

During their cases, Ianto often watched Owen roll his eyes while Jack told stories. He watched Gwen pester Jack with questions. But Ianto contented himself with cataloguing the old case files. He kept some of the documents, like these photographs, in a separate file drawer, a Jack-Harkness file. He pretended that he was doing this to help future Torchwood agents someday, but really it was for himself. 

Finally the computer buzzed out its triumph: the search was complete. Ianto wormed his way around the rows of file cabinets over to his small work table lit with the single lamp. Leaning over the table, since there was no chair, he scrolled through the search results on his small laptop screen:

*1898, Medium-sized vocal bird captured in downtown Cardiff, assumed to be alien origin. Later identified as a white macaw brought back on a trading ship. 

*1906, following the Swansea earthquake (rated 5.2 on the Richter scale), a flock of small white birds emerged from a building and circled the city for a few hours. Near the Cardiff rift, they inexplicably disappeared.

*1954, White birds with spotty plumage and bald bodies covered in scales came through the rift over Cardiff Bay, chasing local fishermen back to shore. File attachments: Early pterodactyl illustration. Reports of early dinosaurs.

Ianto clicked the final link to find a pen drawing of an angry squawking creature that was half-scaled and half-feathered, as if caught half-way between a dinosaur and a bird in the evolutionary process. This sketch was followed by a report tapped out in the spotty ink of a mid-century typewriter. It described in curious terms the natural history and habits of various species of dinosaurs, in details that reminded Ianto of Jack’s voice. 

But the writer didn’t merely find one dinosaur wandering through Cardiff. Instead, this was a survival guide, a kind of travelogue account of life in the jungle: 

“The adults go to the stream for water at dusk, and leave their nests unattended under the broad-leaf trees. The largest eggs, properly cooked, can feed a grown man for a week. Rest deep in a cave, or climb a tree to get shut-eye. The bird-like creatures won’t bother you, and the brachiosaurs and tyrannosaurs that can reach are more interested in chewing the leaves. If caught in a tree by one of these monsters, best to hold tight to the branch and endure, while its long wet tongue explores you. You’ll be slimed but likely stay safe. Under no circumstances taunt the young, since the adults are quick to take offense and have a temper. Oh yeah, and they spit.”

The report margins held loose drawings of other species, small triceratops and friendly hadrosaurs, along with small chicken-sized velociraptors with a measurement line at 16 inches tall. Ianto could picture Jack, launched accidentally too far back in time, foraging desperately for food. Years later, he’d nostalgically sketch giant lizards in his free hours at the Hub. Just possibly, this explained why their Captain was never hesitant to feed their pet pterodactyl each morning. 

But Ianto had been reading for two hours and hadn’t overturned a single fact he could apply to their case. He yawned loudly and looked around. The shadows at the side of the room were pitch black, except for a muted blue glow in the corner. 

He’d left a power cord on, he supposed, but he didn’t need it now. When he shuffled over and stooped down to find the light, it seemed to glow out of one of the drawers. Long left to rust, the metal cabinet creaked and whined when he pulled it open. 

There was a small artifact glowing inside the cabinet. The stone was uneven and fit comfortably in the dip of his palm, porous like clay and smooth as seashells. The glow faded as he held it, leaving the surface dull like wood. 

There were no labels or reports in the drawer. All the other artifacts were always stored in other vaults, in other archive rooms of the Hub, and they were carefully catalogued and shelved. But this was loose and alone, as if tossed aside or placed in a spot it wouldn’t be found. It was impossible to tell whether someone had stashed the artifact here recently, or if had sat forgotten for decades like a penny behind a sofa. Maybe this stone glowed briefly on a schedule, then dimmed, faintly and rarely enough that no one had ever noticed it before. 

Ianto brought the stone over to the light, but under the lamp it looked unremarkable, just the color of wood or sand. He turned back to the files to keep reading, but he turned the stone in his hands as he studied, and now and then, he thought he felt the stone vibrate or hum like a miniature, pleased cat.


	4. The Patterns of Age

The nurse at the Hampton Corner Home led Gwen and Owen down a dim hallway, where they heard echoes of low voices and clangs of medical equipment, and they wrinkled their noses against the smell of must and medicines. 

Someone called and shouted down the hall. Gwen let out a nervous laugh, but the nurse tutted. She was middle aged, with pocks on her cheeks, and messy, curly hair around her face. “Don’t mind old Derby, dear,” she told Gwen. “He’s just having an episode. Happens about every third Sunday, and often in between for good measure.”

One of the old, white-haired residents trailed behind them. “Arthur does it to keep life interesting. Sensitive soul, you know.” This gentleman had bushy brows and carried his cane while he walked. The other elderly residents watched them from doorways, but looked away when Gwen smiled in their direction. 

“Stand back now, Mr. Witherspoon,” the nurse told the old man with the cane. “Let our new doctor in.” 

“A doctor?” Old Derby’s voice grumbled down the hallway after them. “I need a doctor!” 

Owen cleared his throat. “Is there another doctor about?”

The nurse shook her head. “Not right now. This is a retirement home, not a full care facility. We like to keep them spry around here.” She smiled. “Our staff physicians make their rounds once a day, but they're off now. But your patient’s waiting. Right this way.” 

She led them out to another hallway where a couple of cots were set up along the wall. One held a small figure, with an IV dribbling down into the woman's arm. Her hair was long around her face, her eyes firmly shut.

“A woman out running in the neighborhood called her in,” the nurse explained. “Found her lying in the street and thought maybe she was one of ours. You know, a patient with dementia or Alzheimer’s who’s wandered off. She’s unconscious still, but stable.”

The woman lay draped in a loose sheet, her hair white and thin as if she were old, but her face was barely lined, as if she were no more than middle-aged. Owen set down his medical bag and picked up her wrist from under the sheet to take her pulse. “What else can you tell me?”

“There’s no sign of injury, except maybe some bruising where she fell,” said the nurse. “Her vitals seem all right, her pupils a bit abnormal, but it could be from medication.”

“Usually, when patients leave, they don’t come back again,” Mr. Witherspoon said, and gestured with his cane. “But she’s young enough. Maybe she will.” He laughed at his own joke and Gwen tried to smile but found it was morbid, not funny.

Then another familiar voice boomed down the hall. “There you lot are.” PC Andy strode over, in his official vest. “Gwen, we can’t find any records on her. No wallet, or insurance card, no fingerprints in the system.”

“No idea who she is or where she’s from then?” Gwen said.

“Nothing.”

“Well,” Owen said, as he shone a light into the woman’s pupils. “Her breathing’s regular and even, heart rate’s slowed. Slightly abnormal but responsive pupils. Possible contusions or concussion, but it’s hard to tell without further blood work or until she wakes up.”

A commotion in the hallway interrupted them, with the sound of metal rocking on metal, and a door slamming down the hall. “Doctor!” the raspy voice called from the hallway. “I can hear you down there!” It must be Old Derby, again.

Owen looked at the nurse. “I could go say hello, if you like?”

“Perfectly all right, he is,” the nurse rolled her eyes, “just gets those migraines. Problem is, the pills have stopped working.”

“I’ll just pop in and have a chat, shall I?” Owen smiled. 

“Well, be my guest, Dr. Harper! But you won’t be able to help him out. He’s just gone barmy with his age,” she shook her head, frowning down at the woman on the cot that had mysteriously appeared in her care.

“Right,” Owen nodded. “Gwen, let’s get this one packed up, yeah?” He nodded toward their patient, then turned away to find the old man causing the commotion down the hall.

Gwen was left to smooth things over with the nurse and police. “We’ve got care facilities,” she explained. “We’ll get this sorted. Andy, give me a hand?”

“No you don’t, do you?” Andy asked, studying her. He was always trying to figure out what Torchwood was about. Gwen hated being cryptic but it wouldn’t do to tell him everything, either. So, together they wheeled the woman out to the SUV, and then Gwen returned to retrieve Owen from the depths of the retirement home. 

He was still at Derby’s bedside, with the door wide open. Owen stood at the foot of the bed, and Gwen could see him from the hallway. She was hoping she could peek in from the doorway and pull Owen out, but instead he introduced her to the patient. 

“Gwen, this is Arthur Derbyshire,” he said. “He paints when he gets migraines.”

Gwen stepped in the room, and saw that Derbyshire had an easel set up over his knees, and his fingers trembled around the long handle of a paintbrush. A canvas was sitting on a specialized easel in front of him. The painting itself wasn’t remarkable, just an ocean background and a single figure. It was a man, thin, in a long brown suit. He looked familiar, and Gwen decided it was because the subject was so average. Then again, if she were stuck in a home like this all day, any beach scene at all might be heaven. 

One remarkable thing stood out—despite the fact that Derbyshire’s fingers were gnarled and wrinkled, and trembled around the brush, the lines of the painting were perfectly even and smooth. “I paint the future,” he said, watching her. “I can see it happening. But it’s gone wrong.”

Gwen sat down in a chair beside the bed, and mustered a reassuring smile. “Can I take your picture, with your painting?”

Derby leaned forward. “Tell your friends. Something’s coming, it is.”

She took a quick snap with her mobile. “What is it, then? What’s coming?”

Derby frowned. “I don’t know. I was just about to paint some birds here, on the horizon, but now they’ve gone.” He held his arm up, as if to add another brush stroke, and the round point of the brush shook just above the surface of the canvas.

“What did they look like?” Now Gwen was intrigued.

“Ah,” Derby scratched his head, “White birds, like a crane from the Japanese paintings, you know? Flying circles around this fellow here. And there was another woman, off the canvas,” he gestured over to where Gwen was sitting.

“Where’d she go, then?”

“I couldn’t say,” the old man answered, and finally lowered his arm. “Does it mean something to you?”

Gwen nodded. “It might. We’ll look into it.” She patted his shoulder.

Owen had taken out a pad and scribbled something down on the page, “I’ll give you a prescription for the headaches. Might calm you a bit.”

Derby set down the brush in his hands and reached out, grasping Owen’s hands. “Thank you, young man. Good lad.”

“Be seeing you,” Gwen and Owen said their goodbyes, and Derby watched as they retreated out the door. 

\--

Toshiko peered through her glasses down at the thick plastic box in her hands, watching the dials wave wildly on her rift reader, as she measured the artron energy around their new patient. The woman's features looked off, like the distortion through a curved, wide-angle lens. The harsh lamps of the medical room blasted any color out of her skin, leaving her pale and unearthly.

Tosh felt her team watching her in the medical bay. Besides the rift energy, the air held a static charge from Owen’s fidgeting and Jack’s twitching with impatience, while Gwen stood by the balcony railing, her anticipation written in her stiff posture. 

Tosh tried to focus on her patient. The small, sleeping woman with the alien face reminded her a little of Mary, the alien telepath who’d been beautiful and sexy, and completely manipulative. Toshiko hoped this woman, if she woke up, would be different. 

The air crackled and flickered, and the little autopsy room echoed with beeping as the dials of her device stabilized. “High levels of artron energy, matching those of the birds,” Toshiko announced. “She’s been through the Rift, originating from different spatio-temporal coordinates from Earth.”

“Anything else?” asked Jack, but Tosh shook her head. Her machinery could only deduce so much. 

If she still had that telepathic necklace that Mary had given her, would she have been able to tell what the woman was dreaming? Jack seemed to have some kind of telepathic ability, too—could he learn anything else?

But when Toshiko looked up, Jack didn’t seem to be paying attention to her now. He was looking to their doctor. “You’ve examined her.”

“Right.” Owen stepped in. “For one thing, her arms are covered in scars.” He folded the sheet up and lifted her right wrist. Down the skinny length of her arms, a pattern in dark blue snaked down over the pale white of her flesh, branching and joining like the roots of a tree reaching toward her hands. The scarring was embellished with dark bruising and crusted-over scabs.

“Aside from the scratches and bruising from her fall,” Owen explained, “these patterns go deeper, embedded in the epithelial tissues. It’s like ink, like a tattoo.” 

“That’s not a tattoo I’d get,” Jack said, as the others winced. “We need to know what’s in her blood. Is it poison?”

“I’ve seen that pattern before,” Gwen said, coming down the stairs for a closer look. “They were on the boy who was bitten. I thought it was normal for the veins to appear, but Jack, look.” She pulled up photos of the boy on her phone and zoomed in. Snaking down the boy’s arm, and angled up his neck, there was a webbing of faint lines spreading out from the bite marks. They were hardly visible, just like blue veins showing through pale skin, but they did mirror the woman’s patterns. 

“Is it a toxin in their bloodstream? Was she bitten, too?” Jack asked. 

Owen shook his head. “No signs of bites or similar. I’ll run some blood tests. Let you know what I find.” 

“All right,” Jack said. “Toshiko. Any luck on that box?”

Tosh shook her head. “Not really.”

“It’s a sex toy, isn’t it?” Jack grinned.

“Everything’s a sex toy to you, Jack,” Owen grumbled. “Now, get out so I can finish working.”

“Right.” Jack wagged his eyebrows at Tosh and Gwen. “You heard the doctor. Everyone upstairs.”

He bounded up two stairs at a time, but Gwen stopped him on the landing, with one hand on his shirtsleeve. “Something else, Jack. We met a man painting at the care center. Said he paints the future.” 

She opened her phone, showing him the photos.

Jack’s jaw was tense, his face blank, as he stared at the photos. He took the phone, zooming into see the old man’s face. “Painting a beach?”

“He said he was going to paint some birds, and then they vanished. Maybe that beach is where the alien birds fell in from.” 

“Looks like any beach. We won’t be able to track where it’s from,” Jack was still staring at the face in the photograph, of the painter himself. 

“Who is he? Do you recognize him?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Send me those photos, then go find me a solid lead.”

Gwen wanted to protest, but Jack kept talking, smoothing things over. “Did Rhys get off all right to his family’s?”

“Yeah,” Gwen shut her phone and tucked it away, “He’s been recruited to cook his special spag bol. He thinks it’s a great honor, but of course his aunts are just grateful for a night off.” 

Jack laughed and nodded, but he was looking over toward the door. Ianto had emerged from the archives and came over to join them. “I was just about to order in lunch. Pizza or curry?” 

He phrased this question to Gwen, but Jack broke in. “Let’s do Chinese,” he said. “Beef broccoli. So at least we have the illusion of a balanced meal with some green vegetables.”

“I’ll get the sweet and sour pork,” Ianto agreed, brightly.

“I swear,” said Jack, “all these plants overrunning the planet, and you just want to eat meat, cheese, and sauces.” He reached over and flicked a dust bunny off Ianto’s jacket at the shoulder.

“We can’t all eat like tyrannosaurs,” said Ianto with a smile. 

Gwen thought perhaps it was their private joke, but Jack just looked puzzled. 

Toshiko joined them and grabbed her arm. “Chow mein’s fine,” she said. “We’ve got work to do.” She pulled Gwen away, and they made their escape upstairs to the conference room.

“Tyrannosaurs. Aren’t they supposed to be meat eaters?” Jack was asking.

Ianto’s tone was amused. “According to your own reports, no.”


	5. Energy Fields

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The scientist sets a ritual in motion that she can't control.

Five-hundred-thirty years, fifty-three days, and six hours in the future, a high-pressure weather front was sitting at the cusp of a continent, facing off against a cold, low-pressure front. They’d been at a stalemate for weeks. Quiver suspected that within three days, as they traced a cautious path around each other, someone would strike the first blow and then thunder and rain would shake the coastline with their war. 

In the meantime, the air was alive with the electrical energy waiting for the storm. Quiver the scientist sat beside the Doctor. Together, they watched the waves breaking on the sand, just nibbling at it instead of crashing, as if the sea itself was afraid to provoke the atmosphere. The birds pecked at the foam while the tide was away, and the Doctor fidgeted. 

A delicate balance hung in the air as Quiver listened to the silent waves and the Doctor’s silent questions. She’d known that he would be back. It had only been a matter of time. And now, he was waiting for her to choose the right time to start their work. In her hands, she held the small reef he had brought her. She could feel it growing with a whistle and a wheeze. “Thanks for bringing her to me,” she said. “She’s so young.”

“It’s old enough,” said the Doctor.

The coral had probably been growing about as long as Quiver had been living here at the edge of the peninsula. For the past fifteen years, she’d dedicated herself to studying the patterns of energy around the rift just offshore. She was the guardian of this lighthouse, and she used her people’s gifts to guide ships to shore and to chart a safer course for them through the sea of time that swirled just off the coast, beyond the last dark rocks that dotted the bay. 

She could phase time, bend it, and put it back in its place, but she couldn't travel through it the way the Doctor could. She lived alone here, but she could sense all the shiver and quavers of life around her, so she didn’t mind. She knew the Doctor was the same, alone, yet never alone in his own trips through the Vortex.

The job he’d brought her wasn’t difficult, but the weight of it was deceptive. It had implications for the entire Vortex, for the shape of space and time itself. She realized now, holding this piece of coral in her hands, this was the work she had been preparing for her entire life. 

“All right Doctor,” she began, feeling the wind on her face. “This other Time Lord. What’s his name?”

“The Captain.” The Doctor faced outward toward the sea, which was testing the shore in puffs of foam. 

She studied him while he was turned away. “Of course, there are no other Time Lords left, so something new has happened,” she said, wondering if he might explain himself. 

( _Is happening, will happen,_ said the waves brushing the shore.) 

“He’s not a Time Lord, yet,” the Doctor said, “but he’s part of the Vortex.” 

“He will be one,” said Quiver. “The Captain. A good Time Lord name.” 

She transferred the name silently through her hands to the small coral branch that had budded from his Tardis’ heart. If the coral was destined to belong to the Captain, she could forge the bond today to shape their growth together. She reached out to take the Doctor’s hand. “This isn’t a one-way connection,” she reminded him. 

The Doctor nodded and pulled away gently. Quiver watched him draw out a handful of seeds from his pocket, then scatter them to the white birds along the shoreline. “Come on now,” he encouraged. One of them eyed him, cackled, and edged toward him. 

Eventually, step by cautious step, he lured the bird closer. It glared at him with a yellow eye, then grew bold enough to peck the seeds near his feet. Its bright beak stabbed the ground, and the Doctor reached out to pluck a feather from its back. 

The bird shrieked and tried to peck the Doctor’s toes, but the Time Lord scooted back with a laugh and a feather in his fingers. “Oh, no, you don’t!” 

So the bird returned to its meal, satisfied it had fended off the Doctor’s attentions. And, like a proud bird himself, the Doctor turned and presented Quiver with the feather.

“Well done,” she told him. “You came prepared.”

“Oh yes!” agreed the Doctor.

He had never watched her rituals, but he must have studied them, and well. He must have talked with other passersby, or read accounts of the work she performed. She had written papers and published them for the Academy, of course. Occasionally, media broadcasters swept in with their camera ships, swarming her beach to document her work, but she tried to avoid them. Still, her rituals were documented and canonized, readily available to someone with resources, like the Doctor.

Now he rifled through a loose sack that he’d brought with him, and like Mary Poppins drawing out an umbrella, he pulled out a large glass case, framed in metal, with handles on the sides. 

He held it out, and Quiver lifted the heavy glass from his hands to look it over. It was the size of a small suitcase. She reached into it with her mind, unraveling the chemical compounds that formed it, and the trace elements that narrated its history. But the patterns were muffled and contaminated, and as she pried them apart, another story came to her mind. This Captain was not all he seemed, and neither was the Doctor. 

“You haven’t been totally honest with me,” she said finally.

“Well,” the Doctor scratched his neck.

“I asked for something he’d touched. And yes, this has traces of the Captain, but just as much of your own genetic material.”

“He kept my hand in there,” the Doctor said. “For a decade or more. And everybody needs a backup plan.”

Quiver frowned at the case in her hands. The ritual would work, if she could bind genetic material from the Captain to the coral. But if the Doctor’s DNA was mixed with it, the coral would bind to him as well. That held its logic. If he ever lost his Tardis, this coral would always be his home. It wasn’t her place to argue, although he should have explained his intentions before they began.

“Very well, let’s continue.” With the tips of the feather, she brushed the edges of the glass container, and then the surface of the coral. “The feathers contain a semiconductor substance that helps absorb and transfer static electricity and genetic material,” she explained. Placing the glass in the sand, she set the coral nub on top of it. “Once the proteins bond, they’ll be physically related and attuned to one another. Normally, the coral might take millions of years to mature, but his life force will encourage the coral to grow much faster, with a little push from us.” 

She pulled out her tuner from within the folds of her dress. It had taken her decades to build and attune, to learn the subtle nuances of how to fit her fingers against the latches, to twist and focus the electrical wavelengths surrounding them. Now, with this electronic tool, she had subtle control of the energy fields around them. Not everyone could do it, of course--the knack for it coursed through her blood, and it was part intuition and part science that allowed her this power. 

She closed her eyes then and started humming, focusing her mind on the Captain waiting somewhere in the Vortex. She pulled out threads of him, unwinding them so she could study his spirit and heart. He was complex and twined around different timelines, and it took all her concentration. “Think about Jack,” she said softly to the Doctor, waiting expectantly beside her. “He’s part of the Vortex. He’s traveled in time and lived with you. That’s training enough to be a Time Lord.” 

“He doesn’t have this.” The Doctor still seemed worried, and she felt knees brushing hers and his hands around her face. Suddenly her senses expanded, and she could see the man in question. She’d heard of the Doctor’s powers, but the sensation of it now stunned her, as he stepped in her mind and guided her. 

She was standing in a room, seeing the contour of white walls around her, and the Doctor was smiling in front of her. He stepped aside, and there was Jack Harkness, the Captain. He was a handsome young man with a ready laugh and bright white teeth. He shook her hand, and she touched his arm, amazed by the feeling of the rough hair along it. He was so real, and the Doctor stood proudly next to them until Quiver stepped back. 

“Doctor,” she laughed despite the seriousness of her work. “You didn’t say you loved him.” For only love remembered such fine details of another person's skin, and held such pride in making such an introduction.

“It’s not like that,” the Doctor was protesting.

"Just focus on what you need to teach her,” Quiver told him. She radiated calm and focus, and he responded, pulling deeper back into himself. And she was taken with him, into the console room of the Tardis where his time machine waited on his next instructions. 

“Sexy,” the Doctor murmured, and Quiver saw exactly what he meant. His Tardis was his partner, who had been with him from the beginning. When he was tired and sad, and happy and hopeful, he’d had his hands in her innards and cajoled her to do as he asked. He’d longed for her when they were apart, and they could find each other through nearly any distance, even at opposite poles of the Vortex. Quiver reached out and ran a finger along the metal console.

“This is where we begin to spin the energy and start her growth cycle,” Quiver explained. “Stay here with the Tardis and its daughter, and I’ll do the rest.” Slowly withdrawing into herself again, she planted her feet back in the sand and began to stand up. Reluctantly, the Doctor withdrew his hands from her temples.

Opening her eyes, Quiver called her birds in from the sea. She started to move, pulling out the electric energy from the air. She wove the molecules of the air, spinning them with her dance that was half ritual and half science. She shifted her tuner, and her flock of birds began to take off, twisting through the air and turning the clouds of it. They responded to the impulses that she broadcast. Electricity arced out of her tuner to reach them and the coral, and Quiver reached into time and looked for the Doctor’s lost Captain.

She couldn’t find him at first. He was rooted in too many places. When she finally had hold of the thread and followed it, she nearly panicked. His was an ecstatic sense of the universe, woven tight and tangled. “I can feel him,” she called to the Doctor, “His energy! It’s astounding!” 

“He’s a force of nature!” the Doctor called. “Like you!”

She felt his admiration, and she felt joy, and then she felt Jack. He was the Captain, a Time Agent, and then he was Jack, a man, a lover, a guardian of his world’s rift. And the spindle of his lifeline was pulling her to another lighthouse far across the universe.

“He’s too much!” she called, unable to reel the thread in, and feeling herself instead slipping out into the Vortex.

“I’ve often told him that,” the Doctor returned in a voice so small and far away that it was like he’d been flattened in a painting, and the only texture left in the universe was its canvas surface. 

The Vortex was weaving her through its loom. Her birds honked and squawked around her, blown out and flapping wildly against the gusts of the storm that was breaking now, suddenly, in violent rain across her lighthouse. Swirls of color danced before her eyes, along with the shapes of runes from many cultures. The sounds of tuneless music filled her ears. She no longer felt sand beneath her feet or smelled the sea. She was not where she'd been, and she was not sure where she was, and she was falling or drowning beneath a heavy atmosphere and couldn’t quite wake up--


	6. Backlighting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ianto is the archaeologist to Jack's past, but he never puts his Captain on a pedestal.

After lunch, as the afternoon wore on, Ianto peered in the window toward Jack’s office, past the star trails and maps etched in the glass. Jack was sprawled out, boots on his desk, tapping at his computer keyboard. 

“Busy?” Ianto took two steps in the room and waited.

“Yes, I’m doing very important Captain things,” Jack closed some files on his desktop and shifted in his chair. “Have you found anything?”

“I took the liberty of looking up our new painter friend.”

“You did what?” Shadows danced over Jack’s face. He shifted again, lifting his boots off the table and setting his feet squarely on the floor.

Ianto came into the room and read from his file. “Arthur Patrick Derbyshire from Sheffield. Settled in Cardiff in the ‘70s and took up painting. His residence is paid through a trust fund.”

“He’s no part of this. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Jack's voice was cold and hard.

“Derbyshire mentioned the birds. You were thrilled about this case until you saw those photographs," Ianto pointed out. "Jack, you knew him.” 

“It was a long time ago.” Jack picked up some paperwork and began to sign purchase requisition orders that had been sitting on his desk for two weeks. But the set of his jaw was still tense.

Ianto moved around the desk, not so easily dismissed. “Who is he? I mean, to you.”

“Doesn’t matter.” 

Ianto waited. 

Jack tapped at his desk, then stood, then finally gave in. “Listen, Arthur sees things, but he doesn’t know why. So, this woman and her birds were on a beach and fell through the rift. There’s nothing else we can learn here, Ianto. What do you want me to do?”

“Maybe he’d like a visitor.” Ianto looked down at the papers in his hands. “I know who his anonymous patron is. ‘T. Wood,’ really?” 

He handed the folder over, and watched as Jack sifted through the bank statements and digital scans of paintings and charcoal figure sketches. Several of the paintings depicted Jack himself, in various costumes and poses. Jack looked to Ianto, then back to the paintings. 

“It’s a good likeness,” Ianto acknowledged, looking over his shoulder at one particular sketch. “Although fringe and tights? Maybe not your best sartorial choice.”

“You found these on the Internet?” 

“He rents some hosted server space. I hacked the files."

Jack flipped the page and stared down at the paintings, as if he’d never actually seen them before. In one, he was reclining on his side, displaying his smooth stomach and a delicious stretch of thigh. The colors were rosy and warm, like sunlight through a window, and contrasted with the dark tones in the office around them and the charcoal of Jack’s vest. Ianto wanted to reach out and touch Jack’s arm but he held back. “Judging by your state of dress, you were lovers?” 

“Not then,” Jack snorted. “For a long time, he said he wouldn’t sleep with the help.”

“The help?” Ianto asked. They were shoulder to shoulder, Jack leaning in so close that Ianto could smell him, but the Captain had a way of being pressed up against you and yet keeping miles of distance.

“I modeled for him,” Jack explained. “Until he noticed I didn’t age. Said I was too perfect.”

“Then he didn’t know you all that well, did he?” 

“Got bored of me, I suspect.” Jack closed the file, and Ianto felt him take a heavy breath.

Ianto shook his head at this. One thing he couldn't imagine in a life near Jack, was boring. He'd spent so much time just trying to decipher this man beside him. “You might not be perfect," he said, "but you always keep me guessing.”

“You do pretty well at that.” Jack answered, reaching an arm around Ianto’s waist. 

“I am your archivist,” said Ianto, with a sly smile. “But I haven’t found anything useful on the birds today, sir. Perhaps I’ll start on researching beaches.”

“Beaches in Cardiff? I did promise you a day off.” There it was, the old Harkness flirtation, trying to lighten the mood.

“It can wait,” Ianto promised. He extricated himself then and left Jack standing in his office, hovering over the open file folder with all of Arthur Derbyshire’s records. 

\---

The plush pillows, red, started to itch after the first half hour, but the warm afternoon sun streamed through the window, lighting up the curve of Jack’s cheekbones. Across the room, Arthur Derbyshire painted, feverishly struggling to record each ray of light.

Jack bathed in it—the warm sun, Art’s intense focus, even the itch of the pillows. It was no secret, and never had been, that he liked being on display. It wasn’t about sex, although he felt aroused for days after posing. Other people achieved this kind of release from getting high or meditation, but for Jack it was holding still for hours, while someone studied his posture and the light on his skin. 

Everything was laid bare, though he gave nothing away. He never spoke of his past or the future he knew was in store. Still, Art had captured every expression on his face, from longing to pleasure. With each sitting, each pose, and each painting, Arthur Derbyshire was unwrapping Jack Harkness—not the Captain, the Torchwood agent, or the Time Agent, just Jack at the heart of himself. 

What could he have been, if the wars hadn’t taken his brother and his family, and if the Time Agency hadn’t stolen two years of his life, before he became stranded in Planet Earth’s past? He had time to ponder these questions. To think that Art could see him as he could have been, and as he always would be. He clung to that satisfaction, as Arthur worked furiously to draw it.

Then one day Art stood up from his work, his face twisted in confusion. “It’s no good.” 

His steady, thick fingers plucked the canvas off his easel and peered at it in the light. His mustache twitched and his shoulders were rigid. Jack held still and didn’t shift. He only moved his face to watch. Finally, Art grabbed up a palette knife with such fury that Jack thought he might stab it right through the painting. 

“Try again,” Jack suggested calmly.

Instead, Art shook his head. He tossed down the palette knife and stalked over toward Jack. Jack shifted then, scratching his itching bum and sitting up, but Art dropped to his knees on the pillows awkwardly in front of him and stared him in the eye. 

Something dropped out of Jack’s stomach. That light, meditative feeling was long gone. The more Art stared, the more anxious Jack felt. So many years, he’d spent fighting, dying and reviving, years full of grief and sorrow and anger, and all of that was coming to the surface now, as Arthur Derbyshire finally looked through him. 

Jack steeled his stomach and stared right back into the soft brown eyes, reminding himself he had to stay hard and strong and never trust anyone. The safety of this space was gone. 

But Art’s voice was soft, not angry. “What’s wrong with you, Jack? What are you?”

Jack leaned forward. “The same as I was yesterday. What’s wrong with the painting?”

“Same as it was yesterday.” Art said. “And last year. They’re all the same. I’ve drawn you in every pose, in every angle and light. And in the last six years, you haven’t changed, not one new line or scar on you.”

He reached out and touched Jack’s shoulder. Art’s sleeves were rolled up at the cuffs, and his collar was tilted up around his throat rather than tucked in neatly. The curve of his wrists and individual hairs along his arms and cheeks were backlit by the sun. 

“I just look good for my age, that’s all,” Jack offered. 

Art kept staring at him. He had always tolerated a little teasing. He’d even let Jack flirt and play with the other models. But he’d always turned Jack down. 

But now, wordlessly, he reached out and pressed at Jack’s shoulders and chest, ever so gently guiding him to turn around. Art brushed his fingertips down the curve of Jack’s back and over his buttocks. Jack bit his lip and put all his effort into keeping his breath steady, as Art continued down his hip and the length of his thighs, and cupped the curve of his heels. Jack bit his lip, stared at the red plush and wanted to sob at the calm, sexless sensuality of Art’s touch.

Then the painter put a palm on Jack’s waist and turned him around again. He took up Jack’s hands and studied the smooth flesh and straight fingers. “How did you do it?”

“I do age. Just more slowly.” Their hands looked the same age. Jack curled their fingers together. “All right?”

Art shook his head. “I can’t paint you any longer. You know why.”

Jack leaned forward, leaning against him, his breath almost in Art’s face. They’d never been so close but he needed that intimacy, now. “Think about it, I’m the perfect subject. You have all the time in the world to get me right.”

“Perfect shouldn’t exist. I need quirky. Erotic.” Arthur pulled away. “No, I’m sorry.”

Jack reached out, his palms squeezing Arthur’s leg, pulling at the soft beige slacks and kneading at the muscle below. “I can give you erotic. Quirky. Kinky, if you like.”

He was aware he should be able to take the rejection and walk away. He should be grateful if Art let him go so easily, without forcing him to answer the question. There was no way Jack could explain without making himself sound insane, or telling Arthur about the galaxy around him, and all the things in the universe he shouldn’t know. 

But Jack needed this. He was willing to fight for the feeling he’d found only on Art’s stage.

“Steady, Jack,” Arthur Derbyshire held him by the shoulders and held his ground. He gave them a moment to balance and then he leaned forward and kissed Jack, slowly, on the mouth. His lips were wet and warm and gentling, and Jack’s teeth were not. 

“Here’s how it’s going to be,” Art said, lifting Jack’s hand off his thigh. “This is no longer a professional arrangement. There will be no payment for services.”

Art moved Jack’s hand, pushing it back, pressing the palm against Jack’s own thigh.

“I’ll watch you,” Art promised. “Not too fast, now.”

Then he set a new canvas on the easel and carefully picked up his brushes and palette once again, as Jack started to stroke his own skin.


	7. Bugged Bunny

3142\. 3143. Captain Harkness stalked up the halls of the hospital, checking room numbers. “Thirty-one forty-four,” he announced, pushing open the door to the boy’s room. They were keeping the child for observation after that odd bird bite on the highway earlier in the day. 

Owen Harper, M.D., dressed in his doctor’s coat and carrying his medical bag, stepped in the room around the Captain. The lights were dim, the walls beige and bare, and the room contained just a couple of chairs and the patient’s hospital bed. The little boy was eight years old but looked much younger in the tall bed surrounded by its metal bars and monitors that beeped and recorded his vital signs, under dim greenish lights. 

“Are you the specialist?” a woman in jeans and a leather jacket stood up from one of the chairs and came toward them. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair was mussed, as if she’d been crying for the last several hours. 

“That’s right,” Owen answered, reaching out to shake her hand. “Dr. Owen Harper. I just need to take a few blood samples, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m Marianne, Brian’s mother.” She stepped aside, hesitantly, as he pushed past her, and stayed close by his shoulder. “Only, it’s not rabies, is it? And the news was saying they were seagulls. I’ve already told the other doctors, it wasn’t a gull that bit Brian. They were some kind of egret or avocet maybe. Infected ones.”

“At this stage, it’s too early to assume there’s any infection,” Owen said. “And birds don’t carry rabies.”

“Just look at it, though!” she gestured widely.

Owen looked. The boy lay back in bed, half-way watching them with glassy eyes. His chest and neck were bare and red. The nibbled cuts in Gwen’s photographs now looked like dark gashes, with black patterns branching out from them and snaking down to his wrists and up his neck. Around his ear, red spider veins criss-crossed and disappeared beneath his hair, which was matted to his head with sweat. The cuts did look infected, or worse. The boy was clearly feverish, and his arm reminded Owen of the tales of gangrene he’d read about, though never seen in person. 

“Bloody Hell,” Owen cursed under his breath.

“Doctor Harper?” Jack growled, one step behind him.

“He doesn’t look _well_ ,” Owen corrected himself loudly, “but that’s to be expected. This could just be an allergy and be gone within forty-eight hours.”

He reached down, gently, to touch the patterns across the boy’s skin and take a pulse from the wrist. He reached for the boy’s chart at the side of the bed and squinted down at the boy’s medical history and the tests the doctors had already run. EKG normal. No prior surgeries or health considerations.

Marianne clutched her son’s hand, “Look, what kind of doctor are you? You can’t just assume it’s all right. You’ve got to do something for him.”

“We’re going to run some tests,” Owen turned to check the IV dripping in the boy’s arm. 

“It doesn’t even look like a bird bite.” She was looking at Jack now. “And you. You’re not a doctor, so who are you? Are you Scotland Yard? CIA? Is this some experiment gone wrong?”

“Nothing like that,” Jack shook his head. “I’m just assisting. Please stay calm.”

The boy was more awake now, and his fingers worried the old felt blankets. Owen sat down next to him and reached out his hand. “Hello, Brian,” he said, “I’m Dr. Harper. I’m here to help you get better, so can you do something for me?”

The boy nodded. 

“Great. First of all, can you open wide?” Owen checked his throat, but it wasn’t heavily swollen, and he listened with a stethoscope to his breathing.

Finally he reached into his pocket and pulled out a stuffed toy. “I’m going to have to give the rabbit a little poke with a needle,” he explained. “Could you hold onto him? Let him know it’s all right?” 

Brian stared at him, gulped, and nodded. He squeezed the rabbit in his hands, watching its face bend and grin at him.

“The rabbit’s going to be fine,” Owen said. “You can shut your eyes now. There will just be a little pin-prick, nothing to worry about.” Brian screwed his eyes tight shut and squeezed onto the stuffed toy, while Owen pulled out a small black case with vials and syringes. 

Marianne, his mother, looked upset when he pulled out a needle, and Jack stepped beside her and put a hand to her elbow. “He’s fine,” he murmured, and she relaxed a little. Maybe it was the pheromone implants he’d had done in the 50th century. Or maybe it was that he’d lived so long that things didn’t faze him as much anymore. Whatever the reason, he was glad for this ability to calm people and reassure them. 

Owen swabbed the boy’s arm and took two vials of blood, and the woman trembled and shifted on her feet but didn’t interfere. Jack could feel her concern filling the room, but he simply held himself still beside her and tried to ooze reassurance. 

“You did very good,” Owen told the boy when he was finished, but still squeezing the toy. “Can you do one more thing for me? Stay with the rabbit overnight. Make sure he’s okay?”

Marianne followed them out of the door when they were done. “That bunny better not be bugged, you hear me?” she warned them quietly. “And I want to know what those birds were. That pattern on his arm, it’s not an allergy or a rash.”

“Trust me,” Owen calmed her. “We’re doing our best to help.”

Though she was smaller than Owen, she still managed to seem aggressive. “What are they, robot birds?” she continued. “Did your robot experiment escape your lab? I deserve to know, doctor.”

“Okay,” Owen said. “This may be a new strain of avian flu. We’ll run the blood tests and let you know.” 

Jack slipped a card in the woman’s hand. “Call me if there’s any change, day or night.”

“I don’t have much choice, do I?” As they walked off, she looked down at the card in her hand. “Captain Jack Harkness? Torchwood? Hey wait!”

She rushed down the hall after them, but the two men were already gone.

\-- 

“Robot birds,” Owen mused, repeating the mother’s words. “It’s not so far off the mark, when you think about it.”

“How so?” Jack crossed his arms, squinting at the screen above Owen’s medical station that showed the boy's blood sample. In a petri dish, the little cells in the boy' blood swirled around, with little red and transparent oblong shapes competing for space.

Gwen and Toshiko stood beside them, exchanging a look. 

“His mother accused us of making robot birds,” Owen told them, “but it’s almost like the other way around. The bird bites are transforming his body at the cellular level. His white blood cell count is high to fight infection, and his red blood cells are mutating, getting thicker with more silicate structure.”

“Like the chemical structure of those birds’ feathers?” Gwen asked. “Or this girl’s blood?”

“A fusing of electronics and biochemistry, approaching the Singularity,” Jack mused, staring at the screen.

“What, like a cyborg?” asked Gwen.

“Kurzweil’s Singularity theory,” Toshiko said, in her explaining voice. “That’s the point in time when artificial intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence.”

“Or we’ve had so many implants, like pacemakers or intraocular lenses, or bionic limbs,” Owen added, “that people are indistinguishable from robots.” 

“It would be brilliant, if it wasn’t nonsense,” Jack said. “We’re not meant to be fused with or evolve into electronics. This is killing him, not helping him.”

“The singularity implies that technology is embedded intentionally,” Owen said. “But this is an accident. This is what happens if it goes wrong. In his case, the cell membranes are becoming impermeable, so his blood isn’t pumping properly.” 

“What’s our worst-case scenario?” Ianto leaned over the balcony, watching them. 

Owen considered this. “It’s spreading down his arm. He could lose his arm to the infection, or we might have to amputate. But I’m most worried about his heart. If this continues, we could expect to see clotting, stroke, or even cardiac failure, as the heart muscle pumps overtime to compensate.”

“That sounds a bit desperate,” Tosh said. “Can’t we neutralize it somehow to change his cells back?” 

“An anti-coagulant, or blood thinner, might help short-term,” Owen mused. “A full blood transfusion might be the only cure, replacing the mutated cells with healthy ones. Even then there’s no guarantee.”

Tosh was nodding, “Right, the healthy cells could get re-infected too, and the process would start over.” 

“That painter, Old Derby,” Gwen suggested, “If he sees the future, maybe he’s seen something more. We could go talk to him again.” 

“No,” Jack announced. “Art Derbyshire’s off limits. There’s no need to disturb him.”

“What about her?” Toshiko asked. She was standing closest to the woman still unconscious on the cot, listening to her breathe through the oxygen tubes in her nostrils. “Will she wake up? Maybe she knows something.” 

“She’s stable.” Owen moved over to change the view on screen. An image swam into the shape of the MRI of a human brain (or maybe a not-quite-human one), with heat patterns and colors lit up in various regions. “I’ve run some scans, but there are no reflex responses and her neural activity’s limited.”

“She’s still in a coma,” Jack sounded impatient. “We can see that.”

Owen shone a laser pointer over the colored regions on the brain scan. “Her brain activity looks dysfunctional some places, but extraordinary in others. If you think of her mind like a city, you couldn’t walk the surface streets, but you could step between skyscrapers.” 

“So maybe her brain functions differently?” Toshiko suggested. “Maybe she’s low functioning in certain areas like an autistic person, but has advanced abilities in others, like perfect recall or maths skills?”

“She could have brain damage, or brain patterns that I haven’t seen before,” Owen admitted. “Until she wakes up and we can compare her baseline metrics, I just don’t know.” 

“If she does come round,” Gwen said, “What will we do with her? A new identity?” 

Gwen thought of the others whom they had introduced to normal life, others who had fallen through the rift. She still got letters from Emma, the girl who had flown directly from the 1950s to Cardiff in the 2000s. Sometimes, Jack introduced them to people around town, then later confided they were aliens in a human form he called a shimmer. How many were there in Cardiff? What percentage of the Earth’s population had migrated from other planets? 

Jack was shaking his head. “Hold off,” he directed them. “We need to focus on getting this boy out of danger, first. And when she wakes up, maybe we can send her home.” 

He stepped over to the woman then, taking her hand in his own. It was cold, and he pressed his lips to her knuckles. Almost, he thought he felt her squeeze ever so gently at his fingers. The others watched him, then Gwen and Toshiko shrugged and left.

“I’ll let you know if there’s any change,” Owen promised, and Jack thanked him and went upstairs. Toshiko and Gwen were already gone back to their work, but Ianto had stayed to watch from the balcony. He followed Jack into his office and shut the door.

\--

On the beach, the Doctor watched Quiver spin in circles, her face wide with joy. The electrical fields swirled around her, like veins of lightning jolting in white-hot arcs through her tuner to the coral lying in the sand. At the center of this storm cloud, Quiver herself was protected like a living Faraday cage. 

Anyone else would be electrocuted, their psychic senses overloaded and fried, but not Quiver. She was known throughout the local galaxies as a renowned temporal engineer and physicist. But she was more than just a scientist. She danced when she worked, and like the Doctor himself, she had the gifts in her veins to sense how time moved and electricity flowed. 

In another life, they could have been soul mates. Now Quiver was rooted in place, as the purple and blue shadows of thunderclouds grew over her, and time bent around her figure.

Or it should have bent around her, but instead, her figure seemed to flash in and out of the light as if she’d disappeared from reality. When she reappeared, she looked frightened and lost, and the rhythm of light around her shuddered. A rift window gaped open in the sky, like a dark mirror.

“Quiver!” He called her name and ran toward her, but it was too late, and he wasn’t nearly powerful enough to reel in the forces of nature that she’d set in motion. He watched in horror as Quiver’s spinning dance lost control, and the rift pulled her out to sea and into the Vortex. 

Her white birds flapped and squawked, frightened and disconnected suddenly from her spell. They flew out in spirals, unmoored, and flapped away in all directions, some across the ocean and others inland. A few blinked out of existence, sucked into the Rift in her wake.

The Doctor grabbed up the coral from the sand. It was hot with the electrical charge, and he cursed his stupidity as it burned and tingled his hands. It could have zapped him unconscious, and he was lucky that it only scalded. 

“No time, no time!” he called, running up the beach, like Alice’s white rabbit scurrying to safety. 

In the Tardis, he placed the coral down on the console, pulled the levers, and let his ship her choose her own destination.


	8. Voices from Far Away

Gwen sat in the conference room, soldering wires under Toshiko’s supervision to make electrical connections. She held the bulky soldering iron by its long handle and scraped its hot tip against the solder, dropping molten metal onto the two tiny wires she was trying to connect.

But it kept going wrong. Smoke swirled up with its thick metal smell, surely melting armies of her brain cells. The solder dripped and clogged in unwieldy blobs instead of forming tidy connections. The goo hardened into little bubbles and stalagmites. She’d created her very own molten alien landscape, and although fascinating as a tiny sculpture, it was useless as a circuit. 

Gwen groaned and stood up. Nearby, Toshiko was examining her own soldering work that was not just tidy and pretty, but functional too. She’d repaired most of the cube and hooked up some batteries, trying to power it.

“Is it likely to explode or anything?” Gwen asked, wondering if Toshiko shouldn’t be just a little more cautious.

Tosh checked her voltage meter and frowned at the read-outs. “The connections work, but nothing’s happening.”

“For all we know, it’s just a music-box," Gwen said gently, hoping Toshiko hadn't gotten her hopes too high. 

Toshiko turned it in her hands. “I found something like that once, a device with a voice message that just sounded like static to most people. I translated it as, ‘Don’t give up hope.’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“I sent out another message, and found a ship passing by Earth. This alien couple heard our radio broadcasts and love songs, and they thought we were on a search and rescue mission, looking for someone we’d lost out in the universe. So they sent us a message of hope.” 

“Took us a bit literally, didn’t they?” 

“A bit,” Tosh agreed. “They were sweet. So maybe this does nothing, but we have to try. It could be someone out there who needs help, this time.” 

Gwen nodded. She herself had no leads to help in their myriad mysteries. There was no one to go interview, no more research that Ianto hadn’t done hours ago. And with Rhys gone, she didn’t even have much reason to go home tonight. It would just be cold, dark, and quiet there. 

“So what can I do?” she asked Toshiko.

\----

Downstairs in the archives, Ianto had grown restless. He’d skimmed through piles of these fading manila folders, and he’d combed through the vaults. Nothing on birds. Nothing on alien women who looked mysteriously human and turned up unconscious nearby. Nothing on alien beaches, either. And there wasn’t anything more on Arthur Derbyshire, or other trust funds Jack had set up for aging Torchwood agents or long-lost lovers. 

Ianto was stiff and tired and he’d all but given up searching for clues. Now he was just pacing, trying to restore circulation in his feet and think of what they’d missed. He was tempted to call Jack down here, to lure him in a dark corner and make the most of their time. To hold the Captain close and press their wet mouths together, and fumble with trouser zippers, and hear the Captain suck in his breath in the echoing room. But Jack was distracted by the woman from the future, and Art Derbyshire from his past, and now wasn’t the time.

Instead, Ianto found himself stooping down again by the drawer, reaching in to lift up the stone artifact and hold it in his palms again. The little stone he’d found earlier seemed to have grown new bumps in its surface and felt heavier than before. He stepped over to bring it into the light and take a closer look. Could it really be alive, or was it only his imagination it had grown? 

But he’d been sitting all afternoon, and now he was clumsy and stumbling through the dark. His foot caught on a file cart, sending it rolling away with a clatter. As he struggled to regain his footing, his dress shoe scuffed and slid on the cement floor. The stone slipped from his hands and clattered down, tumbling to the ground. 

“Dammit!” Ianto didn’t fall, but cursed his carelessness. That stone could have exploded, or released some alien gas, or create some kind of force-field around him. He stared but nothing happened. He could barely see it there against the floor. It felt dusty when he picked it up again. 

He breathed a sigh of relief. He’d been lucky. These things didn’t always end well at Torchwood, and Ianto had read the reports. More careful now, he carried the little stone back to the table and sat down to examine it under the light. The yellow shadows from the lamp twirled on its surface, like the holes in a sponge, and Ianto found one long scratch etched through the stone. He turned it in his hands, certain that scratch hadn’t been there before. So, now at least he knew how soft its surface was.

Besides that scratch, all the nooks and crannies catching the shadows reminded Ianto now of all Jack’s hidden surfaces. How the stories he told were entertaining, but never complete. There were parts left out, left unsaid, and kept to himself. Kept inside, in the dark. 

Ianto could relate to that, really. Hadn’t he done the same with his own past, his own memories of Lisa and their time at Torchwood One? Hadn’t he kept them close? Didn’t he metre out every story carefully and weigh whether it was worth telling? The pain of losing her was something that Jack must well understand.

And maybe Jack never even meant to keep secrets. The past had a way, didn’t it, of drifting away? Ianto had already forgotten what Lisa smelled like, before the robotic equipment had taken over and he’d learned to associate chemical and metal smells with the taste of her lips. Maybe Jack had forgotten those details of his past too, until some photograph or face kindled his memory. 

So how often did the Captain think about Arthur Derbyshire or other lovers he’d known? How often did he provide for his aging lovers, or other Torchwood agents? How many trust funds were there, buried in Jack’s accounts? And when Ianto turned grey and retired, when he’d all but forgotten Lisa, would Jack still be dashing off to meet aliens and shag young men? Would he set up a trust fund maybe, someday, for Ianto Jones? 

You could get lost on those questions, and there were no good answers. Sometimes the only way to get through the darkness was to keep things light on the surface. That texture in their lives was like the light playing off the stone in his hands. All that spark in Jack’s eyes, the brightness of the words he chose to share, kept them both going. It kept life textured and interesting, rather than dull and lifeless. 

So Ianto decided he didn’t really need to know what Arthur and Jack had shared, all those years ago. If Jack was as old as he said, he should be in a retirement home, too. 

The door clanged down the corridor and heavy bootsteps fell outside the archive door. There was the Captain, as if he could read Ianto’s thoughts. Ianto moved fast, putting the stone back in its drawer. By instinct, he hid the object he'd been puzzling over; by instinct, he tucked himself in a corner to clear his thoughts; by instinct, relegating himself to the shadows.

\---- 

Whatever Tosh tried, she and Gwen saw no lights, no action, and no indication that they could get their cube working again. They’d exhausted their luck and their ideas, and the evening was growing deeper. Outside, the darkness had settled in long ago, with thick fog overtaking the Plass, and a dingy gloom settling over their city.

Toshiko was chattering as they packed up. “The American poet, Maya Angelou, once wrote that she does Sudoku and crosswords while she writes,” she said. “The puzzles occupy her ‘Little Mind,’ so her ‘Big Mind’ can focus on the writing.”

“I think my little mind is in my stomach right now, and it’s growling,” Gwen said. “Dinner?” 

"Yes. Maybe if we take a break, we'll find something we've missed!" Toshiko said, hopefully. They pulled their coats on and tip-toed past Jack’s office as they left for the evening. If he'd been there, he might have asked them to stay. There was a woman downstairs unconscious and a boy in the hospital, and they were Torchwood, and Torchwood never sleeps. Yes, both of the girls were thankful that Jack's office lights were off and he was no where to be seen.

Relief settled in their skin as the chilly Cardiff air brushed their cheeks outside. After hours underground, even the rain was welcome, and the world felt open and vast above them. They let their eyes adjust to the darkness of the evening, and watched the lights reflect off the dampness on the cobblestones, and felt more alert than they had for hours. 

“Outer space may have alien life, but there’s another world here on Earth, too, that we’re missing,” Toshiko sounded wistful as their boots clicked on the pavement and the lights on the other side of the Plass grew closer. 

“Right,” Gwen said, a little sarcastic. “Weevils in the sewers, goths in the clubs, yummy mummies.” 

“And sushi,” Tosh said with a smile.

Gwen tried ringing PC Andy to see if he’d found any new leads, but she only reached his voicemail. So she shut off her phone and followed Toshiko, down an alley a few blocks from the Plass, toward her favorite restaurant. Once seated, Tosh spoke to the waiters and ordered in Japanese without looking at the menu, and the fish was fresh and delicious. Apparently she was a favorite there, and the waitress blushed and visited their table often to chat and check in. The sake was hot and sweet, and Gwen giggled like she hadn’t done in a long time.

“Let’s not go back to work,” she urged Toshiko, when all the fresh fish and white rice and pickled ginger had been eaten. “Let’s call it a night. Movies, my place?” 

So they ended up curled around each other on Gwen’s queen bed, dozing off, instead of fussing over their cube.

\-----

“Ianto?” Jack’s face and grey coat materialized in the doorway of the Archive file room. He looked a little lost, and Ianto responded, stepping back out of the shadows as if he’d been working there, rather than hiding. 

“May I help you find something, sir?” His words echoed in the dull concrete room, as if after hours alone there, the sound of his voice no longer belonged to him but to the room itself. 

“Just looking for you.” Jack took a step forward, squinting into the shadows. Between them was a drawer Ianto had forgotten to close earlier that afternoon, and Jack's hands felt its contour before his eyes could see the markings. He slid the drawer shut and straightened out the label on the front of it. “Hey, this is supposed to be locked." 

Ianto swallowed. "I'm very good with locks, sir." 

"Find anything?" Jack’s face revealed nothing in the dark light, but since he was usually so expressive, the blank look often meant he was hiding something. Maybe he was angry, or just very curious. 

“Nothing useful.” Ianto stepped forward to the other side of the cabinet and repeated Jack’s motion, straightening the label. It held Jack’s own name, because the cabinet held Jack’s files. He’d never marked them off limits, but Ianto knew they were. He wasn’t supposed to be in there, but he couldn’t help himself. There were too many secrets that he needed to know, to do his job properly.

"And you won't, in there,” Jack answered with a smile. He didn’t look angry. He looked amused, if anything. “Try the 50th or 51st century. " 

"Fiftieth century?” Ianto echoed. That was three hundred years from now. What would humanity be like, then, if they’d even survived? Of course, Jack said he was from the future. Maybe he knew what would happen.

"Call it a hunch." Jack’s eyebrow danced.

"Sounds more like experience.” 

Jack closed the distance between them, crowding Ianto in among the cabinets. "Find anything good in my files?" 

Ianto smiled down at the cabinet, and rubbed the edge of it with his fingertip. This one, at least, wasn’t dusty. "Just a lot of photographs and notes I can't read." 

There had been pages of notes, mostly from the early 1900s, in a foreign language of swirls and scripts. But no matter how alien they looked, the weight of the writing and the lean of the letters were all Jack's. Now the enigma in question tilted his head, asking silently, so Ianto reached in and opened the cabinet again, pulling out a particular folder he’d studied. 

Leaning over his shoulder at the strange alphabet, Jack murmured. "They're in Galactic, Standard dialect." 

Ianto hadn't expected to get any hints tonight, even evasive ones. “And that is?” 

"A language that hasn't been invented yet." With a teasing smirk, Jack started to turn away. "Good hunting."

"Jack," Ianto followed him toward the table and the light. “Can you, will you, read it to me sometime?" 

The Captain stood for a moment with his back to Ianto, his grey shoulders looming like a cardboard silhouette. Ianto thought he would walk away, but instead he turned around again. 

When Jack was standing very near him, with a promising look, Ianto felt a thrill, the same way he had when they’d first met and he’d first smelled Jack’s incredible pheromones. He thought for a moment Jack was going to kiss him rather than answer. He wouldn’t have minded much.

But the words that came out of Jack’s lips weren’t English or Welsh or any language Ianto recognized. They were barely above a whisper, and they were musical and hard, a bit like the American accent. That look, that tease, was still in his eyes, and Ianto was fairly certain that in just those few sentences, he was saying something filthy. 

Then Jack paused. Ianto could hear himself breathing in the silence and tried to fill it. "What's that mean?" he sounded raspy now, and swallowed hard to clear his voice. 

"I'll tell you later." Jack started to shift away. 

"And the 51st century,” Ianto continued. “What's it like?" 

"It's not so different." Jack shrugged, his face half-lit in the lamp shining on the table behind him. His shoulders rose and fell, sighing, and for a moment he just looked tired. “People are people. There’s war and fear and hunger. And love. Same as always.”

Ianto waited, but Jack didn’t offer anything else. It was time to change the subject. “Another late night tonight?” 

“Go home if you want.” 

“Sir,” Ianto said, not sure what to offer. “Would you like more coffee or anything?”

“No, I’m going out,” Jack shook his head, then turned back as if something had just occurred to him. “If you’re not going home, come with me.”

“Where?” Ianto set down his files on the stack and looked around. There was no reason to stay now.

“Come and see.” Jack wasn't flirting anymore, and Ianto suspected he was following a lead. Whatever his intentions, they weren't a night out on the town, drinking or dancing or weevil hunting. 

Still, Ianto nodded anyway, arranged his files, then clicked off the light. The door shut and locked behind them, and Ianto followed the dark ink spot of Jack’s shoulders down the long hall.


	9. Recollections

Jack pulled the SUV up to the curb in a residential neighborhood. Ianto hadn’t asked where they were going, and he didn’t ask now. He just followed Jack to the door of the old stone building on the corner, noting the aged curtains and freshly painted window trim. The doorbell chimed, and Ianto tried to read the sign on the door through the darkness. As the door started to open, he made out the words: the Hampton Corner Home.

He recognized the name. It was the home where Arthur Derbyshire was living out his last years. Ianto swung his head around to look at Jack. Did he visit here often, or was it Gwen’s prompting that had finally brought Jack to this doorstep?

But Jack wasn’t looking at him. A woman with a round face, in the sinking years of middle age, had opened the door a crack and was peering through. “Hello?” With the dim light in the foyer behind her, the only feature clearly visible was her frizzy, curly hair. “It’s past visiting hours, you know,” she said.

“I need to see Arthur Derbyshire.” Maybe it was the intensity of Jack’s voice that convinced the nurse to let him in. He had been silent in the car, his fingers restless on the wheel, and he still looked ill at ease now, stalking down the hallway after the nurse. His coat filled up the narrow Victorian corridor.

The nurse knocked at a doorway. “Mr. Derbyshire? You’ve got a visitor.”

“I never get visitors,” said the creaky, weak voice. “Or is it that young lady, asking about my paintings? They’re not for sale, you know.”

Ianto watched Jack, who swallowed and looked at his boots, until the nurse prompted him. “Go on in, then.”

Jack pushed through the door, with Ianto a step behind. “Art?” Jack said. “Arthur? It’s Jack.”

There was a sound like a man clearing his throat. “No one’s used my name in years,” the man was muttering. “You finally came. Jack Harkness. Captain, you haven’t changed.” A half smile lit up Arthur’s face but it looked more like worry or the result of a stroke.

“That’s not entirely true.”

Blankets rustled as Art sat up in bed. “Is it the end? Does that mean it’s my time?”

Jack looked at him, open-mouthed, then shrugged. “I don’t have any power over those things.”

Jack looked helpless. He was staring into the face of a man who should have been younger than himself, but the eyes were clouded, and Arthur’s head was nearly bald, dotted with white, sparse hair. The face drooped under bushy brows, and his fingers clutching the blanket were trembling. He stared back at Jack, as if the Captain might really be a reaper come to collect his years and store them away. As if Jack could absorb the years of his life, and use them to keep himself young.

From the doorway, Ianto couldn’t see, so he slid through the doorway behind Jack’s coat and around to get a better look at Arthur Derbyshire. Nobody noticed him watching.

“I only wanted to see you.” Jack pulled himself together and leaned down, taking Arthur’s hands and kissing them. “Is it all right that I came?”

“I was wrong about you.” The old man shook his head. “You’re a terrible model, but I didn’t mean it, that I never wanted to see you again.”

“Thank you.”

“It turns out I did,” Art said. His hands brushed awkwardly at Jack’s fingers, and then he turned his head and reached toward Ianto. “Look, you’ve brought someone.”

Jack’s right-hand man took a step forward. “Ianto Jones, sir.”

“Why, Jack always finds the handsome ones. Do you model?”

Ianto nearly laughed at the absurdity, “Oh, no, sir.”

“You must sit with me.” The man scooted over—not that there was much room on the small cot—and coaxed Ianto to perch beside him. “Sometime, I’ll paint you, if I may. Is he yours, Jack?”

Jack’s awkwardness disappeared, and he grinned. “I daresay Ianto Jones is his own man.”

He looked to Ianto, and in some vulnerable tilt of his mouth, Ianto saw that he was asking permission. “I suppose I am yours, Jack, a bit.”

Jack just smiled at him but his shoulders dropped their tension, and he turned back to Arthur. “I’ve hear you’re still painting?”

“It’s in my blood. Won’t stop till I’m dead,” Art shook his head, broke eye contact and looked off in the distance. “I still see things. Unbelievable things. But you believe them, don’t you?”

“What kinds of things? Are they dangerous?”

Arthur gestured over to the wardrobe closet, and Jack moved around and began pulling canvases out under his direction. He set these canvases against the wall to examine them.

Arthur still had hold of Ianto’s fingers, so he squeezed them and slid away to Jack’s side.

“Look at these,” Jack breathed, pointing.

There in the paintings were figures and shapes. In one, a woman stood tilting her head against the backdrop of a rocky beach, the sea crashing around her in white flecks of foam. Light arced around on the canvas, and two white birds were circling her. The woman was pale, white-haired, and her face was off-kilter and alien.

“It’s her, isn’t it?” Ianto turned to Jack, but there was no answer. The Captain was focused only on sifting through each of the canvases in turn till he came to the last one.

“That’s today,” Art told him. “Everything you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it, Jack? It’s almost time.”

In the painting, Ianto saw a skinny figure in brown pinstripes on the same rocky shore, and beside him, a blue box that could only belong to one man. Arthur Derbyshire was painting Jack’s Doctor. But what did the skinny Time Lord alien have to do with this?

“He’s already come.” Jack stood and turned back around. “He couldn’t change anything.”

“You’re still as perfect as you ever were,” Art grumbled, fondly. “You’ve nothing to worry about. You won’t wrinkle, like me, or lose your teeth, like me. Your fingers won’t shake, like mine.” He held out his hand, and even Ianto from halfway across the room could see his fingers trembling.

Jack stilled Art’s hand with his own. “What have you seen?” Jack pressed him. “What was he doing? Where is that place?”

Something clicked in Ianto’s mind, as he realized that whatever Jack still felt for Arthur Derbyshire—and clearly, there was affection between them, and lost time—this wasn’t just a social call for Jack. He was looking for information and he wanted it, badly. For all that Jack was usually blithe, for all he usually covered his feelings with jokes or flirtation, he’d been dreadfully serious today.

Arthur regarded him, this time without smiling. “You never used to believe me. When I said I could paint the future.”

“Listen, Art, a child was bit by birds that look just like that. Today, in Cardiff. The woman whom Dr. Harper and Gwen Cooper found here earlier, right in this house, looked just like your painting.” Jack settled on the bed by Arthur’s feet, with his legs hanging off the side.

“I’m not sure what I saw,” Art shook his head, “The white, glowing lady—beautiful, isn’t she? It looked like a ritual, with those birds.”

Jack didn’t look back at the painting. He was too busy studying Art’s face and then he brought the old man’s hand to his lips and ghosted his breath around Arthur’s gnarled knuckles.

“I missed you, too,” the painter said quietly.

Watching, Ianto suddenly felt like an intruder. He turned back to the paintings, trying to leave them a moment of privacy. He slid his camera phone from his pocket, and captured the images to study later. But the blood thudded in his veins and his face felt hot. Someday, would Jack visit Ianto’s bed in a retirement home? Would Jack kiss his fingers like that, with apologies that came too late?

“I’ll visit,” Jack was saying, “If you’ll let me.”

“Anytime,” Arthur answered. “Just don’t tell me how this ends.”

“I couldn’t know that,” Jack said.

As they left, the nurse thanked them for coming. “It’s the headaches, he gets, poor fellow, and he’s not young like you lads any longer. So if he says something strange, you know, don’t pay it any mind.”

Jack ignored her but when they got out to the street, he let out a heavy breath. “There’s so much out there. Aliens and weevils, future worlds, the whole time vortex, and you people just look past it.”

Insulting 21st century humans was just something Jack did when he was upset. This time, he was frustrated with the nurse, and their case, and himself for whatever had happened with Arthur Derbyshire thirty or forty years before.

The streetlights were dim in this quiet part of town, and the streets were empty. Lights shown from apartment windows, but there was no one around to see Ianto lean close to Jack, to brush his arm as if offering comfort, “Let’s go home. I’ll drive.”

“No,” Jack shook his head and pulled away. “I’ll take you home and get back to the Hub. Keep an eye on our mystery girl.”

Jack took the wheel so Ianto slid in the passenger seat. “Do you want company? I don’t mind.”

“Not tonight.” Jack looked like he needed a drink, but he clearly wanted to be alone. With all those mysteries and memories bounding around his thoughts, apparently there was no room left for Ianto right now. He drove with his hands tight on the wheel, staring only at the road. With the car idling outside the apartment building, he reached over and squeezed Ianto’s knee. “Send me those photos, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Ianto leaned in, pulling Jack in for a kiss, before he slid out of the car.

Upstairs, Ianto turned on the radiator and let it whirr and clack, warming up the empty rooms. It was a relief to peel off the suit, to sit in just an undershirt and flannel pants. As he waited for the place to heat up, Ianto stared out the window at the black trees across the street for a long time.

He thought about the Captain, and the cryptic stories in the archives. Somewhere, he’d started a notebook of the hints Jack dropped, all the odd things he said. He’d talked about being pregnant once, of a Time War and fighting in it, of the Great War. All the things he’d seen had to be overwhelming sometimes. Ianto thought of how Jack pushed him away, to make room for the memories he kept of all the others, the ones he’d loved in the past, and the ones he’d love in the future. He wasn’t someone who could give away everything. The Captain was lost enough as it was.

\---

Back in the Hub, silence reigned. Jack stood alone over the unconscious woman’s body. Her eyes were a little wider set, her neck a little broader, and her aging process different than Earth humans. He was only beginning to register her familiarity, realizing how her face reminded him of home. Whatever that meant anymore. Was home that place from his childhood, the sandstone compound looking over the last isolated beach on the shore of Boe Shane? Maybe someday if he lived long enough (and there was no reason to believe he wouldn’t), he’d see it again. Could he go back and meet his mother?

Jack swallowed hard and sat down before his thoughts continued down that road. There was truly no returning from that sort of madness. The woman in front of him was asleep, maybe dreaming of her mother and her lovers.

“What do you know?” he asked her, though she couldn’t answer. He took her hand, and turned it in his and studied the lines of her palm, the way he’d studied Arthur’s earlier. “What do you know of the Doctor?” he asked them both.

The gentle beeping continued from Owen’s cold machines. Finally, maybe after hours had passed, the Captain stood up again and went downstairs to his bed to try and dream.

\---

Gwen and Toshiko had dropped into bed in fits of giggles and fallen asleep with most of their clothes on, giddy with sake and the late hour. The queen mattress felt huge and luxurious without Rhys taking up ¾ of the space, and Gwen drifted off quickly, away from Toshiko’s warmth and the soft covers over her shoulders.

The Earth spun beneath her. The puzzles of the day flooded back into her mind, and she could see the rain pelting traffic on the highway, with light refracting through the wet air. She could see the white bird bodies soaring through their aviary in the sky, and falling down down into the zoo of cars below, where Ianto waited, prim in his suit and poised to collect their broken bodies and hoist them into the Torchwood car.

She breathed again the satle air of the Hub and watched bruises forming over the alien woman’s body. She could see those inky patterns leaking through the woman’s arm, and eating away at the flesh. She pictured the woman’s brain, turning and lighting up in colors as she dreamed, activating parts of the brain for speech, for movement, and sight and sound. The brain scans twisted, rolled out like a paper map, and shifted to a grid.

The woman’s brain was like a city, laid out in blocks and pulsing with traffic and life. Buildings sprouted around her in bright reds, yellows, and blues, and the streets beneath were greens and purples. Gwen’s consciousness floated through it, out to the edge of it, as she fell asleep. Beside her, Toshiko’s body rose and fell with her breath, and became the rise and fall of the ocean, meeting the shore.

There on the edge, white birds flew in over the sea. They darted back and forth between buildings, bringing messages. Gwen wanted to study them, so she plucked them down, pinning them up and splaying them apart.

They were pinned like moths to the edge of the neural wall, and their red guts stood out like the center of a neuron. Then she pulled away for a better look. Toshiko was encouraging her, murmuring poems in her head.  
 __  
…Where water is not thirsty  
And bread loaf is not stone  
I came up with one thing  
And I don't believe I'm wrong  
That nobody,  
But nobody  
Can make it out here alone.

Gwen spun the walls of the grid around, like spinning a Rubik’s cube. She saw the new city blocks slot into place, with new pathways for the birds to fly.

“That’s it,” Toshiko said, clapping.

And Gwen woke up, knowing how to solve their alien puzzle cube.

\--

Jack dreamed too, at last. He was in a painting of the shoreline, its canvas texture stretched out around him and its waves frozen and foaming. A woman from his own time was spinning around with her eyes closed on the beach. Her feet were covered in sand, and the birds danced around her, carving up a field of light.

Magnetic light sparked in her hands, and Jack could feel its heat in his chest, and tingling in his fingers. He watched. He, too, was frozen and unable to move. But he could see, at last, as if he’d been buried deep in the ground and was finally sucking air into his lungs again, for the first time reviving and coming alive.

The box in her palms opened, broad and gaping like a cave, and Jack didn’t hesitate. He left the whispering sea behind, and the birds cawed as he stepped inside the box. It was his first step into this world. He only caught a quick glimpse of blue doors closing behind him, and the darkness lit up bright and welcoming, and he was inside the console room of the Tardis.

It was home, and it was like he’d just left. The Doctor was leaning on the console, murmuring at his ship, his long fingers caressing her and working intensely on the controls. He turned. “Captain?”

And then Jack was awake—suddenly, completely awake, staring into the dark ceiling and at the spot of light above him that led up to his office. He could still hear beeping from the medical machinery monitoring the alien woman’s breathing and heart rate. There was no change.

Jack rolled over and draped an arm around his pillow. He tried to remember what it had felt like to press his face into the Doctor’s shoulder. The bony, cool skin, and his unreasonable scent of artron energy and oil and something like laundry soap. But it had been so long since he’d dropped in to visit, Jack was starting to think he might never return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Verse from "Alone," by Maya Angelou


	10. Coping Mechanisms

The computers hummed, and the water fountain dripped into its basin, as Jack climbed up to feed Myfanwy early in the morning. These sounds of the Hub made the place feel inhabited, rather than lonely. Their dinosaur was raucous and active, flapping around overhead even after she’d eaten. Jack thought that the creature could smell the stranger below, the woman unconscious in the autopsy room, and it made her nervous.

While he waited for the team to arrive, Jack perched himself on the sofa and looked through the photos of Arthur’s paintings. Ianto had texted them over the night before and now Jack studied the brush strokes and symbols, looking for something he’d missed.

The beach sand looked like sand from anywhere, and the waves fell like Earth’s waves, in no particular grey or blue shade he could name, and the birds were just birds. They didn’t look alien, and he didn’t recognize them either. Based on how ordinary it all looked, Jack concluded the planet had similar gravity to Earth’s and a similar atmosphere, causing similar wave patterns and coloration in the sand and sea. The birds were similar to earth birds, with the same physiology for flight and foraging.

Finally the cog door screeched open and Ianto was the first to arrive. His suit was clean and pressed, with dark slacks and jacket and a daring purple tie. Jack looked over, stretched, and stood. “Oil the door sometime, would you? It’s starting to shriek like the dinosaur.”

“Yes, sir.” Ianto pinched his mouth together in a farce of a smile. His eyes were puffy, and he looked like he hadn’t slept well. “Morning.”

Jack trailed him over to the espresso machine, and Ianto pulled a double shot for Jack and one for himself. They drank them in companionable silence, shoulder to shoulder and close enough to feel the hair of their forearms brush. It was an unspoken and fragile intimacy. Ianto sighed, as if he might say something. 

Jack wondered if he should talk about Arthur Derbyshire, or share a story, but he wasn’t sure what Ianto wanted to know. He felt like a mystery, even to himself, but the biggest mystery was whatever Ianto was waiting for.

When they’d drained their cups and Jack sat back down at his desk, Ianto left to make a pot of coffee for the rest of their crew. He brought Jack a cup of the special brew, setting it down gently by his arm. Jack was about to reach out to him, when the phone rang. 

“The day begins,” he muttered.

Ianto nodded and left him to the work.

“Captain Jack Harkness. This is Torchwood.” Jack braced himself, not sure whom to expect on the line.

“You’ve got to help us. You must know something by now.” The woman’s voice on the other end was panicked, and he recognized her before she identified herself. “It’s Marianne, from the hospital. My son Brian’s unconscious.”

“Please stay calm.” Jack put on his smoothest, most reassuring voice, and tried to gather more information. 

She said the boy’s infection had spread down his arm, and he could barely move his hand. It had spread up his neck, and he was in and out of consciousness. The doctors didn’t seem to know what to do for him but were still running their tests, and hadn’t Dr. Harper learned anything new by now?

“I’ll call the doctor right away,” Jack promised. 

Owen was already halfway to the Hub, and when he arrived, they tried to reach the boy’s attending physician, a Dr. Stuart. Ianto had hacked the boy’s records and found a phone number, and Owen called the doctor directly, on speakerphone from Jack’s office.

“Hello? This is Dr. Adrian Stuart.” A woman's voice. Owen looked pleased by this. 

“We’re with the Center for Disease Control,” Owen announced, “monitoring a new bird flu being spread ‘round. We’re evaluating one of your patients, a Brian Earling. Is there any improvement in the patient’s condition?”

“He’s getting worse,” Dr. Stuart admitted. “I’m at a loss. The tests don’t match anything we’ve seen before.”

“At this stage, the fibrous patterns on the arms and the thickening of the blood are consistent with symptoms in other patients,” Owen told her. “We need to run some more tests.”

“Could you meet us here around 9:30, and we’ll review the lab results?” the doctor offered. “I’m sorry, I have an appointment right now with a patient.”

“Yes, of course,” Owen agreed. They hung up, and Ianto came in to bring them a file folder of the lab results that Dr. Stuart had already tested. She too had discovered the thickened cell walls, and how they blocked blood flow in his arms. She remarked on the possibility of blood clots and heart failure, just as Owen had done. 

She had also administered a cortisone injection for the inflammation, but the boy’s conditioned had only worsened.

“That’s bollocks,” Owen cursed. “Cortisone could increase his risk for cardiac arrest. I would have given him warfarin.”

“All right, so what’s next?” Jack sat back and crossed his arms.

Owen sighed. “I hate to say this, Jack, but it’s too far along to just amputate the arm. He could use a blood transfusion.”

“All right,” Jack grimaced. “Take Gwen with you, when she gets in. She’ll help smooth things over with the other medical staff.”

Owen nodded and went to prepare the equipment that he would need. When the cog door shrieked open again, and Gwen's leather boots clicked across the cement floor, Jack was ready. “Gwen, good morning. I want you to go with Owen—“

But Gwen wasn’t paying attention. She made a bee-line upstairs toward the conference room. “Not now, Jack, I’ve found something. Is Tosh here?”

“Not yet. Listen, we need you at the hospital for surgery.”

“I’m not a nurse.” Gwen brushed him off and rushed upstairs, leaving Jack spluttering behind her.

It was so simple, she wondered why they hadn’t seen it before. It had come to her in the dream. Yesterday, Owen had described the woman’s neural grid twisting. He’d pinned open the birds and looked at the structure of their organs. In her dream, these details came together to show Gwen the anatomy of the cube. It wasn't a static circuit at all. It was dynamic, shifting, and its power stemmed from inside the cube and its relationship with the air around it.

She’d woken up suddenly, alert, in the chilly air. She was alone in bed, the covers thrown off. Rhys was gone for the week, and Tosh had fallen asleep with her.

At dawn there was only a wrinkled, bare spot in the bed where Tosh had slept, proof she'd been there the night before. Gwen wandered through the empty hall. She peeked in the bathroom and in the kitchen, but Toshiko wasn’t there. On her dining table, Gwen found the note. “Gone home for fresh clothes. See you at work. _\--T_.”

Gwen dressed and drove straight to work, eager to share her discovery, only to find she’d beaten Tosh to the Hub. The conference room was quiet and dark. Gwen waved at the sensors, and as the lights flickered on, she stuffed her headset in her ear and dialed Toshiko.

“Hello?”

“Tosh, listen.” Gwen dove in without preamble, afraid it would get away from her if she hesitated at all. “All along, we’ve been calling it a Rubik’s cube but we haven’t thought to twist the edges. That’s got to be it. The circuits have to align properly for it to work.”

“Good theory,” Tosh said, her voice muffled by the static of traffic around her. She was driving. “We couldn’t find a way to twist the cube, remember?”

Gwen paused, her memory triggered. Tosh was right. They’d pressed the cube this way and that, but it hadn’t budged or shifted.

“I had this dream,” she said, confused. The early morning adrenalin in her veins was fading, and now she felt drowsy. With Tosh’s rational voice in her ear, she realized that the logic of dreams usually held no sway on reality.

“I’ll be right there,” Tosh promised. “I’m just at the bridge! We’ll take a look, all right?”

“Okay.” Gwen could picture Toshiko revving the engine of her shiny red convertible and running all the red lights to get to the Hub. If anyone could wipe her own traffic record clean, it was Toshiko Sato.

“Ahem, coffee?” Ianto cleared his throat at the door and set a coffee tray down on the table. “I’ve been asked to remind you that the Captain requests your company on their hospital visit?” 

“Thanks,” Gwen said. “Sorry, I'm kind of in the middle of something.” The coffee smelled divine, and Gwen inhaled deeply as she brought it her lips, hoping the caffeine would jolt her creative memory and click the final puzzle pieces together. She stared at the pile of electronics gear Toshiko had left in the room, as if they might spell a message that hadn't been there the night before. 

But Ianto stood stubbornly nearby. “The boy’s unconscious,” he persisted. “Might need surgery.”

“I’m close to solving this,” Gwen told him. It wasn’t like she had the medical degree to help at the hospital. The best she could manage was crowd control.

Finally Ianto turned back to leave. “I’ll tell him to back off, shall I?”

He and Jack may have been fighting or shagging all night, Gwen thought. Whatever was going on between them, she couldn’t help feeling she’d just made it worse, and Ianto never got the fair end of the deal. “Sorry!” she called again, as the sound of his boots disappeared down the metal steps.

Gwen sighed and set to pulling open the boxes and bags of tools that Tosh had tucked away neatly the night before. She was excited to get her hands on the cube and test her hypotheses. She was peering at it to no avail, when Toshiko finally came in a few minutes later.

“I came as fast as I could,” Tosh said and shut the door. “Is something wrong down there?”

“Just the usual, Ianto and Jack having a domestic. Owen, with the usual stick up his backside.”

Toshiko nodded and peered at the cube in Gwen’s hands. She hoisted herself up to sit on the table. “Okay. What are we supposed to do?”

“In the dream, it twisted. Light came pouring out, with those birds flying around,” Gwen recalled.

Tosh studied the large diagrams still pinned to the wall, moving her finger across them to plot the paths of the circuits. Finally, she tapped the edge of one of the diagrams. “These pads. Maybe they’re latches.”

She grabbed tweezers from the toolkit, and beckoned Gwen over. They put the cube under the magnifying lens, and Toshiko pointed with the tweezers to two matching squares at opposite edges of one of the cube’s faces. “Can you push them, or twist them?”

Gwen looked where she was pointing, and reached in with her thumbs.

“Use your fingers, not your eyes,” Toshiko suggested.

So Gwen shut her eyes and imagined she was trying to read the Braille alphabet. She felt along the surface of the cube till her fingers rested on the small nubs, and she pushed and prodded, but nothing happened. For a minute she struggled, flicking her fingers around, until she knew it wasn’t going to work.

But she persisted another moment, and finally she pressed them in toward the center and turned her wrists, and something gave. At first she thought she'd broken the fragile alien thing. Then she realized the cube had only shifted and clicked into place. “It worked!”

They peered down at it, trying to make out the pattern of the surface. “Can you do it again?” Tosh asked.

“It’s like a latch. If I press and twist, maybe.” Gwen bit her lip, concentrating, and pressed the cube again, until it shifted once more. 

Toshiko peered at the cube under the magnifying lens again and pressed her voltage meter to it. “It must be the conductivity in your skin, like a touch phone or trackpad,” she decided finally. “When you move your finger, it senses the change and direction of capacitance, and sends the signal to an internal mechanism to shift the faces. It’s brilliant!”

“It is?” 

“Not the trackpad, but the circuits themselves. Do you see what this means? Each of the faces is interchangeable.” She took it from Gwen’s hands and started playing with it until she was able to shift it herself, and she looked very pleased. “You shift it. The circuit changes. It can do something entirely different.”

“But it’s not doing anything now, is it?” Gwen asked. She immediately regretted saying anything as she watched Toshiko’s excitement drain away.

“I suppose not.” 

They looked around the room, but everything looked normal as ever.

\----

A night to himself clearly hadn’t helped Jack’s temper. Maybe he was worried for the injured child, or pining for the Doctor, or maybe reliving his history with Arthur Derbyshire. Whatever the reason, Ianto found he didn’t much care which particular stick had found its way up the Captain’s ass.

Ianto coped with Jack’s distemper the best way he knew how. He hid downstairs in the archives.

Standing in his quiet work room, Ianto pulled out his new pet artifact, the little stone. He wanted to hold something that was his, a private, secret thing he didn’t have to give or share with the rest of the team. It seemed to have grown again, grown bigger and heavier, and now it felt like a paperweight in his palm. Warm to the touch, as if someone had held it all night.

Maybe Jack had been, coaxing marvelous tricks from its hidden surfaces. Yesterday, the stone’s dappled surface had reminded Ianto of the hidden secrets and memories Jack kept close. He’d thought he’d learned to accept those secrets and mysteries. But no matter how much intimacy they sometimes shared, it always seemed Jack was just toying with him. They’d fight together and fuck together, but in the end it was always a distraction, not a relationship.

Yesterday, he’d also been sure he’d scratched the stone when he dropped it. Now, as he held it up to the light, the scratch seemed to disappear, leaving only a smooth surface. His eyes seemed to be tricking him in the dull light. Had he really slept that badly?

He had, in fact. He’d lain awake, watching the shadows dancing across his wall, thinking about Arthur Derbyshire and old age, and the fickleness of Jack Harkness’ affections.

Troubled, Ianto pocketed the artifact and began organizing the stacks of folders he’d collected in the last day. His research hadn’t revealed anything new. 

He wondered if he should search for something besides birds or beaches. Perhaps another box or puzzle like Toshiko’s had been documented somewhere in the annals of Torchwood. But that was the problem with boxes, they were merely containers and could be used to hold, well, anything. And the same was true of electronics devices, which this certainly was, and which could do so many things.

Tohiko's voice spoke in his ear as he tried to figure out what he should do next. “It’s gone quiet up here. We could use a clatter of coffee mugs.”

“Happy to oblige,” Ianto said. The weight of his worries seemed to lift as he tucked the stone in his pocket, flicked off the light, and made his way upstairs. 

The ladies of Torchwood were lounging by their workstations in the main Hub. Jack was absent and the dinosaur had finally settled in her nest.

"Hey!" Tosh tossed something his way as he walked through the door. "Catch!"

“No!” Gwen called after her, looking horrified, and Ianto looked about, frantically, but couldn’t hear or see anything.

"Shit!" In the next second, he realized Toshiko had successfully faked him out. Ianto breathed a sigh of relief and feigned a running catch of an invisible artifact. “You’ve discovered how to operate the alien football, then?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t!” Toshiko held up her cube, very much intact. 

So Ianot pretended to toss the imaginary ball back at her, as he jogged slowly toward the coffee machines. "Fixed it then?"

“No luck, yet,” Tosh told him. “But we got it turning. More caffeine, then more tests.”

Unsurprisingly, a crowd of unwashed mugs had piled up since he’d washed his own and Jack’s earlier that morning, all with rings of brown at the bottom. Ianto swirled them in the water, while Gwen and Tosh crowded around to chat. He liked being in the Hub when it was just Gwen and Toshiko and they were cheerful. They asked him for coffee sometimes, on they chatted, and sometimes they flirted a little, and Ianto could pretend everyone at Torchwood was easy to get along with.

“You don’t have to wash mine,” Gwen told him. “Just going to pour a fresh cuppa in there, yeah?”

“You want it to taste fresh, don’t you?” 

They took their coffees over to Toshiko’s workstation, where she hooked it up to scan the wavelengths that it was broadcasting. She hooked it up near some modified speakers, attached to her computer via USB. On screen, small waves cycled, and she typed in numbers, trying to calibrate the readings.

“It’s still not doing anything,” complained Gwen.

Ianto watched them crowd together, and felt out of place. He didn't know their research thus far, or what exactly they were trying to accomplish. The Hub was warmer than the archives, and stuffy, and he was growing overheated. Perhaps a bit dizzy. 

He really hadn’t slept enough. He put the hot mug in his hands down, but it didn't help. He still felt overwhelmed and overheated, as if the room was closing in and he couldn't breathe. He tried loosening his tie. He’d already lost track of what Tosh was saying. He hoped he wouldn’t faint or get sick.

“You okay?” Gwen’s hand on his arm jolted him back. “Ianto?”

But she seemed to crowd him in, and Ianto backed up against the desk, trying to get some space and get some air.


	11. Overheated

“Too hot.” Ianto fumbled at the buttons on his vest, trying to get out of the wool. Gwen reached over, trying to help, but she was getting in his way. She was too concerned. It was overbearing. He pulled away, crowded and confused. “No, just leave it.” 

Toshiko had left off poking at her alien cube and was watching them, concerned. “Are you sick?” 

“I don’t know,” Ianto mumbled. He felt cooler as soon as he peeled off the vest. When he tried to fold it and set it down, he found the heat was localized in the pocket. 

He rarely kept anything in there. It ruined the line of the suit. But now he remembered. When Toshiko had called him upstairs, he’d dropped in that little stone. Now, the pocket was hot with it, as if he’d spilled a fresh cup of coffee down the front of the vest. He could hear his own breathing, calming down again now, as he fumbled the weight of the stone from the outside of the pocket. 

“Maybe sit down a moment?” Gwen’s hand was cool on his clammy forehead. “You don’t seem feverish.”

“I’m fine,” Ianto reassured them, trying to lean away from Gwen’s hands. He stuck his fingers in the pocket and tried to pull the stone free, but at first it wouldn’t budge. It caught on the seams, and he was afraid to yank and tear the seams of the lining. Eventually he worked the object loose, dropping it on the desk. It was a hot potato, too hot to touch now. He tried to explain. “Found this downstairs in a drawer. It’s hot!” 

He finally was able to fold the vest and set it down. He took a heavy breath of air, wiping at his forehead. Toshiko was studying the stone but Gwen was still reaching out to touch his arm, to steady him. He was embarrassed by her concern, but that was all right. If he did suddenly get sick or dizzy, it was good to know someone would come to his rescue. He mustered a smile, “Much better now.”

Toshiko was touching the stone. “It’s cooling down. Maybe some property of your body heat energizes it?” She pondered it another moment, then turned back to her cube. “I’ll test it later, once we’re finished here, all right?”

Ianto nodded his agreement, but Tosh had turned back to fiddling with the cube, then squinted at her screen. 

“Could they be related?” Gwen wondered.

Ianto lifted his stone again, cradling it in his hands with curiosity. What was causing it to glow and heat up? As he held it, and Toshiko puttered at the computer, the pebble in his palm seemed to vibrate, then grow heavier. 

“Something’s happening!” he exclaimed. The stone trembled and seemed to wobble in his hands. He watched little nubs sprout from it and brush his fingertips. He looked up and found Gwen was watching too, staring at his hands with wide eyes. 

Toshiko, too, was looking between her box and the stone. “I switched the setting again. It must have affected this thing.”

“Maybe it’s actually alive? Do you think?” Gwen asked. 

They looked back down at his hands, and he turned over the stone. Its surface was marked by little irregularities, with nubs like branches or the tines of an antler, and it had outgrown his palm. 

“Like a pet rock?” Toshiko asked, skeptically.

“We’ll name him Rick Rock,” Ianto suggested. 

Gwen threw him a look that had half a groan built in. “As long as Rick Rock doesn’t roll.” 

“Yesterday, it healed itself,” Ianto told them. He reached over Toshiko’s desk, looking for something sharp. It was littered with papers and tools, and he picked up a small piece of wire. “I scratched it, and it smoothed out.” 

He scraped the edge of the wire across the stone, leaving a gash in its surface. They stared for a moment, but nothing happened. 

“Try another setting?” Gwen suggested, turning to Tosh. 

Toshiko thoughtfully bent her fingers around the hidden latches and twisted the cube again. Then, like water evaporating from a hot pan, the scratch seemed to wobble and shrink, until the surface appeared smooth and undamaged again. “It worked!” Ianto exclaimed. 

Toshiko reached forward and ran her fingers across the branch surface, very close to Ianto’s fingertips. “Incredible,” she said.

“Will it heal skin, too?” Gwen wondered. “Can we heal those woman’s cuts?” Tosh and Gwen stared at each other, hope lighting up their faces. 

“Wait,” Ianto told them, but they ignored his caution and swept into motion. 

Gwen rushed downstairs, and Toshiko shoved the portable rift detector in his hands. “Take this. Come on!” Ianto followed a few steps behind as she hurried down to the autopsy room after Gwen. As she neared the woman, Toshiko held up her cube and her voice sounded agitated. “It’s shaking! What’s it doing?” 

“Careful!” Gwen said.

“We don’t know if it’s safe,” Ianto pleaded. “Turn it off!”

For all they knew the cube would melt the woman’s insides, and Owen would be furious if he had to scrub the puddle of her off the floor. Their Captain would spend days in a temper, too, if they lost the beautiful alien girl. If anything happened to one of them, Ianto didn’t even want to think.

The medical machines were still beeping around them, and the woman’s condition still didn’t appear to have changed in the last 24 hours. Gwen peeled back the sheet that covered her arm, revealing the patterns that curved around her shoulder, down her pale arm, and faded out by her elbow. Now, the branching veins of those markings were shimmering like lightning bugs flying back and forth through ink. “Look!” Gwen said, awed.

Tosh came forward and held the cube next to the woman. They could see her eyes move rapidly under her lids. “She’s clearly having a reaction. Ianto?”

Remembering the rift detector in his hands, Ianto held it up and peered at the dials spinning and clicking on the gauges. “What do I do?”

“Just hold it there! It’s set to relay the wave forms to the computer.” 

As they watched, some of the scarring and scratches on the woman’s arms bubbled and began to heal, like a scab softening and old tissue being sloughed off. Underneath, the skin was pink and new. “It’s working!” Tosh exclaimed.

Ianto fumbled his phone out of his pocket, and set it to record video of what they were seeing. The woman’s bruises faded to yellow, her scabs dried out and dropped off, and the dark patterns in her arms faded. And on the rift detector screen, the pattern of her brain waves changed just slightly.

Gwen was the first to say anything. “We’ve got to call Jack.”

The woman still lay unconscious, but there was a softer look on her face, and her eyes continued to flicker beneath their lids, calmer now as if she was dreaming. 

\-------

When Quiver disappeared from her beach, she left a gaping hole in the air, and static electricity flickered and arced in her absence. Lightning spread across the sky, like waves in the wake of a boat. 

The Doctor shut the Tardis door behind him as the storm struck the shore with full force. As he held the burning coral in his hands, the Doctor urged the Tardis to find the right destination to keep the treasure safe. He heard rain pelting the outside of his ship as she set sail, wheezing and hissing through the storm.

Where they landed was Cardiff, 1891. In a damp room that smelled like stone and earth, by the light peeking from the Tardis door, the Doctor found a row of filing cabinets labeled in careful hand-penned English. He could feel the Cardiff Rift nearby. 

The Doctor looked around, then placed the coral safely at the bottom of a drawer, cloaked with a special perception filter of his own design. He could feel the Captain, someplace in this Cardiff. He shut his eyes and breathed out just one wish, that Jack in this time would find some joy to hold onto for the years to come. 

There, in that damp room, the coral would grow unseen for a hundred years before anyone could find it, alongside Jack himself. The Doctor could never go back and meet Jack along this timeline. Too dangerous. Too fraught and complicated. But he could give Jack something worth waiting for. 

And then he climbed back in his blue box and spun the dial to a hundred-plus years in the future. “Just find her,” he urged the Tardis, with all his energy concentrating on Quiver. 

On her beach, although she only stood about medium height with a slight build, everything moved at her whim and by her will, and he concentrated on the presence of her: energy kind and fierce, which danced invisibly around her; the paleness of her face; the riveting grip of her fingers; her telepathic sense of empathy and intuition for her environment. 

“Find her,” he asked as the Tardis wobbled and wove through the Vortex. When the time rotor stopped and the Doctor stepped out, it was to a much more crowded file room, caked in dust and lit by a few buzzing fluorescent panels. In 2008, the Torchwood archives stood in a more accessible room that tasted of sweat, must, and the grit of trains. 

Jack Harkness, in this time, was Torchwood’s Captain, still growing into the name. Now the file drawer was one among many, and as the Doctor brushed his finger along the steel corners of the drawers, trying to identify the right one, he was startled by a shuffling and clearing of the throat behind him.

“Stay right where you are! Hands where I can see them!” 

“What?” He turned to see a young man, well-dressed, with a handgun aimed at him.

“Doctor? Hands up, please.”

“Hold on,” the Doctor kept calm, “I don’t mean any harm. Isn’t that Ianto Jones?”


	12. Put to the Test

At the hospital, Dr. Adrian Stuart assisted Owen to prep the operating room for Brian Earling’s blood transfusion. Brian had gone from mumbling and feverish, to a light coma. Fortunately the hospital had a ready supply and match for his blood (AB), due to the donation center on site, so they could perform the procedure that day.

The little boy looked pitiful and pale in the hospital bed, the little stuffed rabbit that Owen had given him tucked under the covers with him, watching them even when the boy was unconscious. Jack held vigil with Brian’s young mother, comforting her as she cried. “Just hold on,” he told her, “Once we’re finished, he’ll be all right. Just keep holding on, can you do that?” 

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Captain,” she asked him as she clutched his hand tightly and pressed her face in the shoulder of his coat. He wrapped an arm around her for a moment. The doctors had not offered her any similar reassurance. But Jack remembered very well—one of his girlfriends had lost a baby once. He’d lost a baby once. He remembered.

When they were ready, Jack himself wheeled the boy down to the operating room and convinced Dr. Stuart and the other staff physicians to kindly wait outside while Dr. Harper completed the prep work.

Owen still had tests to run. The couldn’t monitor the artron energy levels and toxins in the boy’s blood from the hospital, so they called back to the Hub. “Toshiko, need some help before we get started,” Jack announced through his comms, and was relieved when Gwen and Tosh responded. 

They’d been ornery going on rebellious earlier that day, but now were in better spirits. Gwen proudly informed him they’d begun to solve their puzzle box. 

“Congratulations,” Jack said, “but there’s a life to save here.”

“The woman’s scars are all but gone. We’ve seen this heal living tissue,” Toshiko explained. “Maybe it could heal that child, too.” 

“We could use a miracle,” Owen said. “Our patient’s in piss-poor shape to be on an operating slab right now.”

While Tosh ran the boy’s blood through the Torchwood database, Ianto sent Jack the video he’d recorded earlier. Jack and Owen watched, with growing excitement, as they saw the small alien artifact healing, and then as the cube begin to shake and the woman’s arm healed.

“What was that artifact?” Jack asked.

Ianto answered him. “No idea, sir. Found it in the vaults.”

“Okay, we’ll look more closely later.” Jack paused his own speculation and considered the implications of what he’d just seen. “The results look good, but your patient is comatose. Can you control the results? Is it safe?” 

“We’ve barely begun testing it, sir,” Ianto said. “No ill effects as yet. Not so much as a paper cut.”

“Our blood transfusion could be a death sentence, too,” Owen admitted. “He’s already in toxic shock. No guarantee the infection won’t recur.”

“We don’t have time to waste,” Jack said. “What if that cube has side effects we don’t know yet? For us as well as this kid?” 

Owen considered this. “Tosh has been messing with that box, and they’re all fine. Let’s give it a go.”

“You heard the doctor,” Jack announced on the line. “Bring your thing-a-ma-what over here and work your magic, Tosh.” 

While the Captain went to placate the other doctors and nurses, Owen turned his attention back to their patient. Brian’s blood pressure was dropping, though his heart was pumping overtime. Owen fussed over the drip IV in his arm and reduced his medications. But it was impossible to prep for a procedure when you had no idea what to expect. 

Probably it was too much to hope for, that their magic medical tool could reverse tissue damage. You couldn’t heal heart disease or a gangrenous limb with a band-aid. He squeezed his eyes tight and murmured a “please,” which was the closest Owen Harper ever came to prayer. For now he could only wait and see. 

\---

Toshiko and Gwen were packing their gear and the tools that Owen had asked for, and Ianto buttoned his vest back on and smoothed himself down. 

“I’ll store this away,” he said, referring to the stone that had grown on them. “Who knows what it will do next, around that device.” The thing was the size of his forearm now, with small branches coming off the sides. 

“Just hurry,” Tosh told him. 

Ianto was glad to move, to hurry down the hallway, to have something to do with his pent-up nervous energy. If the child didn’t live, or if the cube misfired, there were serious penalties they could be facing. He didn’t like taking chances like this, with children’s lives, but what choice did they have? 

As he set the branch on the table in the archive room, next to his chaotic stacks of paperwork, he shivered in a sudden wind. He looked around through the dim room, but he was underground, in rooms of stone and safe as houses. His blood chilled as he felt a weird breeze that smelled like ozone, and heard a noise so high-pitched that his ears throbbed.

The file cabinets were changing shape. They were growing, turning blue rather than grey—but no, it wasn’t the cabinets after all. There was something appearing in front of them. A larger cabinet. A wall of some kind, taller than himself. It had a door. It was only 3 by 3 feet.

A giant, square, blue box could only mean one thing. Quickly, Ianto reached under his jacket for his sidearm. 

Once they’d established the hands-up game and the Doctor was playing along, Ianto motioned him over to the desk. “Sit, Doctor.”

“Ianto, you know me.” The Doctor looked between the gun and Ianto, his brows drawn together with incomprehension. 

“I know your tendencies.” Ianto kept his poker face on. “I said, sit.” He kept his voice and hands steady, his feet planted on the ground, and his gun aimed at the Doctor’s chest.

The Doctor obeyed, slowly lowering his hands to the table. “What if I said, I’m here to help?”

“You didn’t call first or come in through the door. That’s a bit suspicious.”

“It’s a private matter.” 

“It always is, with you and Jack,” Ianto said, reasonably, without sounding bitter. “And even then, you appear in the Hub proper.”

The Doctor looked at the table. He’d been dropping in for a while. There were late night trysts, him and Jack sweating and moaning and shouting. Ianto had once or twice excused himself when he realized the Doctor was around, and another time walked in on them, not realizing.

Now it was Gwen who interrupted. Her voice startled him through the headset he wore. “Ianto, how much longer? We’re ready to go.” 

“Something came up,” Ianto answered, pressing his finger to the receiver. “Go on without me. Tell Jack I’m monitoring the situation from the Hub. Good luck.” He muted his line again and shut off sound before he got caught up with her questions. 

When he looked back up, the Doctor was watching him. “A woman fell through the rift, and I’ve followed her. She’s in trouble.” He looked back at the table, and his eyes went wide as he caught sight of the artifact that Ianto had just set down, the little branch. 

“Tell me that’s not a secret weapon,” Ianto prompted, indicating the branch.

“A weapon?” the Doctor asked. “You think she’s a weapon?” The Doctor shut his lips tight in a thin line and slowly reached out to pick it up.

“Hey!” Ianto stopped him. “Hands to yourself.”

The Doctor withdrew his hands, but kept his eyes fixed on the stone. “It’s a gift. For the Captain.”

“For Jack?”

“Do you have another Captain?” The Doctor’s eyes flashed, cool and condescending. “Let me talk with him. With Jack.”

“Hands behind your back.” Ianto reached over the desk and picked up a pile of zip ties he’d been using to organize the computer cables. “You can talk to him when he gets back.”

“Ianto, we’re friends, remember?” the Doctor protested. “You helped me find a new home for a settlement of refugees, when their planet was dying. You helped us ferry the Earth home, when it was pulled out of orbit by the Daleks. You know me.”

Ianto bent over, and the Doctor didn’t struggle as Ianto secured his wrists together. He watched in grim silence, swallowed thickly, and kept his mouth pressed tight shut. His eyes were wide and alien. Ianto inexplicably wondered, for the first time, what expressions the Doctor made when Jack made him come. 

Once he was restrained, Ianto pulled up a chair. “I know Jack runs to your every call and comes home when you tell him to. And I’m not him.”

“The woman who fell through your Rift is important in her time. She may be injured. Let me help her.”

“How do I know you’re not a shapeshifter, or compromised?” Ianto said. “And as for Jack, you always leave him behind. Why should he trust you?” 

“He chose to stay.” The Doctor answered quietly, with a flash of defiance in his eyes--or was it jealousy? 

Ianto set down his sidearm, but stayed wary of the Doctor. Even tied up, he wasn’t harmless. But it didn’t hurt to talk to him. If he was the real Doctor, maybe he could help after all. “The woman upstairs is unconscious but stable,” Ianto told him. “But we also have two birds that bit a young child. That’s where Jack is, at the hospital with the boy.” 

He flipped through the photos on his phone to pull up the paintings he’d captured the night before. Arthur Derbyshire’s likeness of the thin, pinstriped figure matched the Doctor’s build and silhouette, and Ianto set down the phone in front of Time Lord. 

“Now tell me, what’s going on in this picture?” Ianto nodded at the picture. “The box in her hands, is it safe? Can it heal someone who’s been bitten by those birds?”

“Where did you get this?” The Doctor studied the phone, and Ianto’s face. “The box is her tuner. It’s tuned to her, specifically. It converts an ambient electric field to a targeted bioelectric charge, focusing on an object or person nearby. And yes, it can function as a dermal regenerator, or genetic binder to fuse two samples, or inhibit or stimulate brainwaves or tissue growth.”

Ianto barely understood the technical language he used, especially how fast the Doctor spit the words out. “Is it safe?”

“It’s a tool built by a highly trained scientist,” the Doctor snorted. “In the wrong hands--I really couldn’t say what might happen.”

“Are you the right hands?” Ianto hoped the Doctor might say _yes._

The Doctor shook his head. “Of course not. She is.” His stare was earnest and his eyes wide and pleading. “Let me help her,” he repeated. 

“All right,” Ianto gave in. “Upstairs, now. Move slowly, Doctor.” He picked up his sidearm, training it on the Doctor’s back as he led the Time Lord upstairs.

\-----

Jack sat in the waiting room with Marianne Earling and the doctors while he waited for Toshiko to arrive, but he was bombarded with questions and distrustful looks. The doctors didn’t want another specialist and his assistant taking over the case, and they weren’t ready to trot off and attend to their other patients. Meanwhile, the young mother just sat by herself, looking worried while her son was alone with Owen in the operating room.

Jack tried to explain to the assembled group the reason for the delay. “We’re waiting for some specialized tools that Doctor Harper needs for his surgery,” he said. 

Dr. Stuart was flanked by two other curious doctors and a nurse. “Remember, Brian Earling is still my patient,” she said. “If this is an experimental treatment, we have the right to veto the procedure.”

“The procedures are developed specifically to recognize and treat this new strain of influenza,” Jack said, stalling. “I’m sorry, I don’t have further details I can share at this time.”

Dr. Stuart sighed, folding her arms. “We’ll expect a full explanation, while the patient is under our care,” she warned him. Quietly, so Marianne at the other end of the room wouldn’t hear, she added, “We’ve all lost patients. You’ll understand we want to do everything we can to help. We don’t want to put the boy any further at risk.”

“The best we can do is stay available to help if Dr. Harper needs anything,” Jack tried to reassure them. He sat down with them. It was excruciating waiting, in part because he had a general aversion to the process of biding time, and in part because he could feel all the others in the room covertly watching him for some sign of what to expect. He fancied they were checking out his handsome profile, too, of course.

Another young man entered the waiting room a minute later, and Marianne rushed into his arms. “Jim! Thank God you’re here.” 

“How’s he doing, Mare?” 

Her eyes flew to Jack and then back to her friend—who also had a handsome face, Jack noticed. Marianne said, “Still running tests, I guess. They want to operate.”

As they talked, Jack gathered it was her brother, a lawyer. “We should press charges,” he told her. “If you hadn’t been stuck in that dreadful traffic, and those kids hadn’t sideswiped your car, you’d have stayed safe inside, yeah? If Brian hadn’t been outside when those rabid seagulls flew down, we wouldn’t be here.”

Marianne looked upset, and Jack couldn’t hear her answer. Jack realized that the man was solving the problem the only way he knew how, trying to find someone to blame, and some way to distracting Marianne from her crying. He persisted, even when she looked more upset. “But you got his license number, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did, but Jim, none of that’s going to help Brian.”

Jack considered reminding them that it was the birds who bit Brian, not the drivers, and the birds were long dead. But none of that would cure the boy, so he kept his peace. Finally, Tosh and Gwen arrived, and every face in the lounge turned toward them. 

“Folks, this is Gwen Cooper.” Jack took the lead. “She’s from our Patient Relations division and will help answer your questions. And Doctor Toshiko Sato will be assisting Doctor Harper. Let us through, please.” 

The family and physicians looked on, as Tosh stepped between them and through the double doors into the surgery. Jack followed, ready to block the doctors if they made a move to follow, but they just looked on with a resentful silence. Tosh skipped scrubbing down, and instead went directly into the operating room. Owen had donned a face mask and latex gloves, along with his operating gown. He looked ready for anything. 

From her leather travel case, Toshiko pulled out the little cube. 

“So that’s the miracle maker, is it?” Owen asked. 

“Ianto’s called it the Cure Cube,” Tosh told him.

“How’s it work?”

“Gathers ambient energy. Stores it in capacitors,” Tosh said. “You twist the cube to select the circuit and adjust the regulators to control how strong the energy flows. Then it broadcasts the wavelength. One of these settings seems to heal scarred or damaged tissue. The other promotes cellular growth.” 

“These aren’t cuts in his skin, Tosh,” Owen told her impatiently, “they’re damaged blood and tissue cells. Did you measure how deeply your curative wave can penetrate? Will it flush out the toxic cells?” 

“We haven’t tested it precisely, so there’s no guarantee this will work,” Tosh said, unhappily. “But it’s what we have. It’s up to you.”

“Bollocks, Tosh, we have a roomful of people waiting out there and a life in our hands.” Owen was clearly having second thoughts.

“Owen,” Jack broke in from behind Toshiko. “Transfusion or cube. Your choice. But make it now.”

Owen looked over at their patient. He’d started prepping the boy, lifting the sheet around his tiny body and revealing the mottled, bruised stains on his upper arms. Before, they had seen a distinct veined pattern, but now the blood had spread out, making the whole arm look bruised in splotches of purple and yellow. Brian’s breathing was labored, wheezing, as if in a humid climate at altitude. The machines beeped with his elevated blood pressure. 

Owen looked at the boy, lying there in critical condition. He studied the shining surface of the cube, and then met Toshiko’s gaze. “Let’s do it then.” 

“Just stay with him.” Tosh swept into movement, holding up the cube and concentrating. “We had success with this setting before. Okay. One. Two. Three.” She turned the dial for the cube and stepped closer to the boy. The machines continued beeping, and the boy’s breathing pattern did not change. 

“Nothing’s happening,” Jack said. “Try something else.”

Toshiko put down the cube, and went back to her bag. “I thought this might happen.” She pulled out two white feathers from a small plastic case in her bag, explaining, “These might help conduct electricity to speed up the process.” 

She set the feathers beside the boy’s arm on the white sheet and then raised the cube to try again. Her hands began to shake, and Jack thought she was nervous till he saw the excitement in her face. The cube was activated. The child’s eyelids flickered, and his body trembled on the bed. The patterns on his arms seemed to become more vivid, and he moaned. The wavelengths on the monitors shifted, beeping with some alarm. 

“Shit, Tosh,” Owen said. He moved forward and hovered his arms over the boy, unsure whether to touch him or not as he lay there shivering. The doctor settled on resting his hands on the boy’s elbows, trying to hold him gently in place. Meanwhile, Toshiko was concentrating intensely, her lips moving as she focused on the cube, moving it up and down the boy’s arms. 

The bruising receded, and the branch pattern became visible again. The purple and yellow colors faded. Then the boy’s breathing calmed down, and he stopped trembling. Jack kept pacing back to look at the medical displays. “Life signs steady. Heart rate elevated, but normal,” he called.

“I think it’s working!” Owen finally said, letting go of the boy’s arms. He watched a scar on the boy’s face fade and disappear, and his cheeks return to their natural color. “That’s enough.” 

Toshiko switched the cube off. She looked like she’d run a marathon, her face sweaty and her eyes a little distant. Jack caught her as she began to sway and sink backward. He settled her into a chair. “All right?” 

“Just exhausted,” she said. 

He adjusted her and lifted the cube from her hands. “Just rest.”

Owen went to work then, peering in the boy’s pupils with a pen light and testing his reflexes. The patterns no longer looked like fresh tattoos. Now they were shimmery scars, like stretch marks. The boy looked peaceful, and Owen turned to hook the saline drip in his arm to rehydrate him. 

Carefully then he took another blood sample and set up a portable scanner to test it. While he worked, Jack kept vigil by the bed. Within 15 minutes, the boy’s eyes flickered open, looking around. 

“Hey there, tiger,” Jack said. “Don’t try to talk. Can you squeeze my hand?”

The boy stared and squeezed tightly. 

“You’ll be all right,” Jack laughed. “Judging by your strength, you might turn out to be Superman.”

“Jack.” Owen called him over then, to look at the test results. The boy’s blood had been cleared of the toxins, and his cells were going back to normal. “He’ll be groggy a few days. There may be some residual symptoms, but the toxin’s cleared from his system and his cells are looking normal again. Monitor him overnight in the hospital just to be safe.” 

When they wheeled Brian out into the waiting room, Marianne shrieked and rushed forward to them. 

“We expect your son will make a full recovery,” Owen told her.

Tosh leaned against Jack, and they watched as Marianne hugged her son until Brian spoke up, “Mum, stop squashin’ me!” 

She laughed through her tears, kissed him, and turned to hug Jack just as tightly. Next she hugged Owen as well. Then the nurses were wheeling Brian back to his room for observation. 

Dr. Stuart, followed by the other curious medics, pulled Owen aside for some questions, but he detached as soon as he could. “I do have other patients to attend to. When the research is complete, you’ll receive a full report,” he promised.

Jack had to practically drag Torchwood’s doctor away from his new fans, so they could get on the road back to the Hub. They piled in the SUV, Owen driving, and Tosh and Gwen chittering in the back seats, giddy with their success. 

There was only one person missing. Jack touched his earpiece. “Ianto, our boy’s safe, and we’re coming home!” 

He just wanted to get back to the Hub, find Ianto, and celebrate somehow. He was prepared to suggest breaking out the champagne and letting a bit loose tonight, or else having Toshiko try another experiment on their still-unconscious alien patient. If that didn’t work, he could take Ianto weevil-hunting, and shake off their tension with the thrill of the chase. 

But the line was dreadfully silent. “Ianto, you there?”

“Captain.” Ianto sounded far away. “Code yellow. Intruder in the Hub. Situation currently contained.”

“Damn it.” Jack’s stomach dropped again, and he prodded Owen. “Drive faster!”


	13. Awakening

Sirens blared behind the Torchwood team, as Owen barreled the SUV through a red light. In the backseat, Gwen activated the police radio. “This is Torchwood, Code Yellow, heading left through intersection of Vine and Castle at 75 kilometers per hour. Official business, do not pursue. I repeat, do not pursue us. This is Torchwood official business. Over.”

They held their breaths for a moment, and the sirens faded out behind them. “Copy that, Torchwood. This is Officer 3117. Good hunting. Out.”

Next to Gwen, Toshiko was turning the cube over in her hands. “We could do incredible things like this. Just a few more tests are all we need. We might even broadcast alpha brain waves, and wake up the woman downstairs.” 

“Let’s get the Hub secured, first,” Jack said. “Tosh, focus on the fastest way back to the Hub.”

After that, except for Toshiko calling directions to Owen as they drove, they were all silent. All they knew, was that Ianto was alone at the Hub, facing some type of intruder or threat. Gwen wondered if the Hub had been compromised even before they left for the hospital, and Ianto had told them to go on without them, hoping to take care of it on his own. 

They pulled to a halt on the Plass and burst out of the car. Silently, aware they were visible from some of the CCTV feeds within the Hub, Jack directed their movements. Owen and Toshiko took the invisible lift, while Gwen and Jack burst in through the cog door. Each of them stood alert, guns drawn and pointing this way and that around the Hub. 

But the main floor was silent, dreadfully normal. They peered in the shadows, trigger fingers twitching and ready for war. Jack felt his stomach in his throat. He expected the intruder by now had Ianto hostage. They would sidle out of a shadow, holding a gun to Ianto’s head. And the archivist would stand there, terrified and brave, waiting for rescue. Because Ianto trusted him above anything else. 

But there was no alien kidnapper, no threats or hostages. Instead, Jack and Gwen, Owen and Toshiko glanced at each other and took a circle formation, back to back at the center of the Hub. Jack was about to motion them in different directions, to head down the corridors and up into the board room. 

Ianto’s own muffled Welsh voice drifted up from below, where their patient lay in the autopsy room. “Down here,” he said. He sounded fine, but it was hard to tell.

“Ianto? You hurt?” Jack hurried toward the sound, with Gwen close at his shoulder. He approached the stairs cautiously, peering over the railing. Was the intruder holding Ianto tied up down there? Were they after the alien patient asleep downstairs? 

The Captain faltered when he saw Ianto’s prisoner, sitting calmly by the woman’s bedside. The pinstripe suit, the hands behind his back. His sonic screwdriver sitting two feet away on the surgery table, next to the patient. The Time Lord’s long fingers were worrying at the perky plastic ends of zip ties, while the Doctor furrowed his eyebrows together. His clothing looked rumpled and specks of sand dotted the edges of his sleeves. 

Ianto was sitting beside him, looking up at Jack’s expression. His eyes flickered to see Gwen and Owen and Toshiko flanking Jack’s back. “We’re fine here,” Ianto said.

The Doctor turned his head, and peered up at them with his endless brown eyes, worry scrawled on his face below his messy mop of hair. “Captain,” he said, one eyebrow raised. “Mind letting me go, now?” 

Jack’s heart pounded. Something must be terribly wrong, for Ianto to have tied up the Doctor. He couldn’t be a threat, but then again there were always shape shifters, alien diseases, or psychosis. Or maybe, something nagged him, Ianto was just jealous and fed up? He’d imagined Ianto beyond that, but the boy was young still. 

Keeping his bootsteps quiet, he made his way down stair by stair, studying the scene and making no sudden moves. Gun at his side, pointing down and away, Jack stepped up and looked the Doctor in the eye, close enough to see the individual hairs growing out of his eyebrows. The details were all there, down to the solemn expression, the skinny cheekbones, and the wild hair. Everything in Jack’s body screamed this was the Doctor, the man he’d claw heaven and earth apart for. 

And beside him, Ianto stood, stoic and unreadable. 

“Ianto?” Jack said, through gritted teeth. “Care to explain?” 

“It’s a precaution,” was the prompt reply. “He appeared downstairs 90 minutes ago, and wanted to see her.”

The Doctor licked his lips and said his name in a voice that was even, smooth and determined. “Captain.” He was poised, as if unfazed by the gun Gwen was still aiming at him, over Jack’s shoulder. His scorn and anger were clear enough to Jack, even if the rest of the team couldn’t tell. 

“Owen,” barked Jack. “Stethoscope. Toshiko, run your tests on that cube.” 

The Doctor’s voice was still, eerily calm. “I asked the Tardis to find her. There was an accident.” 

Owen had pulled out a stethoscope, and Jack reached for it. “Let me.” He tucked the earbuds in his ears, and slowly reached to press the metal chest piece against the Doctor’s suit vest. He remembered the feel of those ribs under his hands, the light fuzz over the Doctor’s chest and the texture of his small brown nipples against Jack’s fingertips. Jack gulped. The sound of two thumping heartbeats, offset from each other, throbbed in his ears. He could smell the alien’s scent, and for a moment they stared in each other’s eyes. Jack’s face grew hot. 

“Captain, you found Rose Tyler hanging from a barrage balloon. You were the con man who did the right thing, in the end. And I didn’t,” the Doctor announced, staring in his eyes, as if trying to prove himself. 

Jack took a sharp intake of breath, and looked to Ianto. “Let him go. Let him go now.”

Ianto slipped a knife in the Doctor’s bonds, and the Doctor pulled away, rubbing his wrists. “Thank you. Listen, she has minimal brain activity. She overloaded, falling through the Vortex. I need to reach in there and jump start her cognitive processes.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?” Jack looked down at the woman, who was still slumbering away. If her mind was off dreaming someplace and the Doctor reached in, he could get pulled in and lost in her unconscious mind. He could lose himself.

“Doesn’t matter.” The Doctor’s face was dark and determined. 

The metal clang on the stairs above interrupted them, and Toshiko came whirling down the stairs, her face transformed by a pair of protective goggles. She held up the cube. “I’ve got it! Tuned for her brain waves, or at least, normal human consciousness.”

“That’s Quiver’s tuner!” the Doctor said, staring at the box in her hands. “What? How? She’s built and studied that for decades to use it properly. You couldn’t possibly.”

“This is Toshiko Sato, our electronics expert,” announced Jack, more than a little proud of his team.

“I’ve repaired it,” Tosh said. “The other setting uses the ambient electrical charge in the air to stimulate organic tissue at the cellular level, but I reprogrammed it to human alpha brain waves.” 

“I’d estimate with the amount of power in this building, that could be very dangerous,” the Doctor warned her.

“I can dampen or enhance the current,” Toshiko said. “If you twist the box, you can change the amperage by engaging different capacitors or resistors.” 

“If it works, that’s quite brilliant,” he acknowledged. The Doctor stepped aside and let her stand beside the woman on the table. 

As Tosh stood there, hovering at the bedside, the Doctor moved to the head of the table, brushed the woman’s hair aside, and gathered his hands underneath the base of her skull, cradling her head. He quietly gave Tosh permission. “Go ahead.”

Jack looked around and put a hand to Ianto’s shoulder. Whatever happened next, he had to make sure that Ianto was okay with continuing this. “All right?” he asked. 

Ianto gave a decisive, curt nod, and pulled out his stop watch. “Ready.”

So just like that, the Doctor was accepted, but Jack still held a nagging sense that something was off. Why else had Ianto distrusted him earlier? Jack leaned in toward Ianto, but the archivist was himself. He stood a certain way, brandished his stop watch with his usual flair, and looked on impassively. His voice and smell were right. Jack took a relieved breath and stepped away again.

Meanwhile, Owen had moved toward the monitors at the head of the hospital bed, and looked at Toshiko and Jack. Tosh, too, was waiting for his signal. 

“Go,” Jack directed. Then Tosh turned her eyes to the box in her hands. The lights began to flicker, and the woman’s eyes once again started moving under her lids. 

“Jack,” the Doctor said, “Take her hand.”

Jack did, picking up the slender palm in his own. The woman’s fingers were chilly and hung limp, and he stroked them with a thumb to coax blood back in. 

The Doctor had closed his eyes. “Come back to us. Quiver, we’re all here.” 

Once again, Toshiko felt unnerved, as if the electricity in the air was building and putting pressure on them. Beneath her hands, she saw the woman’s chest rise and fall, rise, and fall, slowly relaxing as if a seized muscle in her back had just let go.

“More brain activity,” Owen announced as he watched the scanners. “She’s waking up.”

“That’s it,” urged the Doctor, eyes still closed, as he held the woman’s neck and hovered above her.

Slowly, Tosh moved the cube slowly back and forth over the body beneath her, trying to even out the waves surrounding her. 

Jack felt the hand in his own grow warmer, and when the woman’s eyes flickered open finally, Jack’s face was the first she saw. 

“One minute, 30 seconds,” Ianto announced somewhere behind him.

“Captain?” she asked in a weak voice. Her eyes were muddy green, like waves on a stormy shore.

“I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure.” Jack smiled down at her.

“I followed your life line all the way back here, where it’s rooted,” she said, and started tilting her head back. “And the Doctor’s here. In my head, pulling me home.”

“I’m here,” he agreed. “Best rest a moment.”

“Her heart rate is normal, brain activity restored.” Owen left his monitors and pushed his way in. Jack stepped aside and let him get to work examining the patient. “Pardon me, I’m Dr. Harper.” He shone his light in her eyes. “Wiggle your toes?”

She did so. “I feel all right. Anchored again.” But she went along with Owen’s tests for her reflexes. She managed to sit up. The Doctor held her steady, as Owen took her blood pressure, then urged her to stand. 

“Blood pressure is normal, with no change sitting or standing,” Owen finally announced. 

“And one last test.” The Doctor came round and scanned her with his screwdriver, then nodded at the readouts. “Good. You feel all right?”

“Yes, Doctor.” The woman had been looking around at them, and her eyes caught on the box in Tosh’s hands. “Please,” she asked. “I thought I must have lost it.” 

With some reluctance, Toshiko handed it to her. 

“Where are my birds?” asked the woman next, turning to the Doctor. But the Time Lord just shook his head, and looked askance toward Jack.

Jack and Gwen shifted, uncomfortably. “They’re dead,” Jack admitted, uncomfortably.

“They were threatening a whole motorway of people. We couldn’t just let them go free,” Gwen explained.

The woman’s eyebrows knit together with sadness, and she blinked rapidly. Her body sagged against the Doctor, who wrapped an arm around her to hold her up. “Steady now,” he murmured. 

Quiver nodded, took a careful breath to collect herself, and then looked up at them, one by one. “I’m sorry for the damage we caused, falling through your Rift.”

“Just glad we caught you,” said Jack. 

“My Tardis is downstairs,” the Doctor promised. “We’ll get you home.”

“But the Captain’s here,” she said, reaching out for Jack’s hand. “We should finish.” 

“There’s one thing we’re missing.” The Doctor looked to Ianto. “If you don’t mind.” 

From the Doctor’s cryptic, and disjointed tale, Ianto had pieced together a few things that made no sense. But he thought he knew what the Doctor was after, and with a nod from Jack, he left to go underground and retrieve the alien branch. 

“We’ll need a private place to work,” Quiver said. “Captain, just you and I, and the Doctor.”

Jack considered this odd request. “The roof, maybe. If you’re up for it.”

Ianto came back a few moments later with the branch, the little artifact that had grown in his hands. He handed it not to the Doctor, but to Jack, who took it and squeezed Ianto’s hands. “Thank you.”

Ianto nodded his understanding and backed away.

Quiver was thanking Toshiko for her work, and studying the repairs she’d made on the cube. “You’re a natural. I’d show you my trade, if you’re willing.” 

Toshiko nodded, eagerly.

“Come with me, when we’re done here, to my light house?” Quiver’s smile flashed, like a spark of electricity in a light bulb before it flickered to light.

Toshiko stood with her mouth open for a minute. This strange alien was inviting her to another planet, to study with her, but she couldn’t imagine leaving Torchwood and everything she’d known. How would she ever get home again. “Thanks,” she finally said, “but I think I’d better stay here. It’s my home.”

The Doctor put one hand to Jack’s elbow. “It’s time, Captain.” 

“We’re only going upstairs,” said Jack, to reassure his team. “I’ll be back soon. I promise.” 

They stared as Jack disappeared with the Doctor and Quiver, behind the cog door. 

“What do you think that’s all about?” Gwen asked.

“Heaven knows,” Owen answered, as he sterilized his equipment. “We’re better off without Jack’s bloody secrets. Gwen, you were a perfectly good leader when he was gone.”

“He wouldn’t leave us again,” Ianto said. 

“Ianto, give me a hand with the tools?” Toshiko asked. Together they went upstairs to clean up the electronics spread over her desk. Once Ianto’s hands were full of objects and carefully filing them away, she asked, “If he leaves, will you be all right?”

“Of course,” he said. Then looking down at the equipment in his hands, he shook his head. “Of course not.”

“Me either,” confessed Toshiko.

Gwen, meanwhile, helped Owen dismantle the monitors and hospital bed. They threw the sheets aside to be washed, and put the birds in cold storage. They worked in silence, both trying to figure out what was going to happen next.


	14. Beyond the Shadows

The Captain followed his Doctor and the scientist, Quiver, to the roof, and followed their lead to sit cross-legged on the damp cement, knee to knee in a circle. A light drizzle settled on their shoulders and wet their hair, underneath the clouds that had set up shop centuries before in Cardiff. 

From the damp, voluminous folds and pockets in his brown coat, the Doctor pulled out a small branch. It was nothing but a shadow. The only light they had was the street lights glinting off the sky, reflected down toward them from Cardiff city, and in the dark chilly night, the Doctor’s face looked grave and shadowed. But he was looking at Jack and not the thing he held in his hands. 

The Doctor reached out his palm and held the branch in the center of the circle. Tentatively, Jack reached out to touch its surface. It was uneven, organic yet smooth, with small nubs and protrusions. It was thick where the Doctor’s fingers were thin, and even as he touched it, the branch seemed warm to his touch and began to glow with some sort of internal light of its own. He resisted the urge to jerk away from it, and noticed the Doctor too was holding carefully still.

Jack’s knowledge of alien worlds told him this was an alien creature, or a growth off a unique bioluminescent tree, or an object supercharged through a journey through the Vortex. But somehow his mind was throwing away all those ideas because, touching this thing, he was making an irrational guess of his own. It couldn’t be what he thought, but he couldn’t stop himself from hoping. A thrill coursed through him, jolting up his spine, and he stared at the Doctor. 

“Is it from the Tardis?” he asked. “A new coral?” His voice was raspy in the damp night. Even as he expected the Doctor should be telling him _No,_ his eyes lit up with a yes. 

But it was Quiver who answered. “Take it,” she urged Jack. “Does it speak to you?”

Her face was radiant now. He could see the color back in her cheeks and her eyes were wide and alert. When she had slept on their autopsy table, Jack had noticed how familiar she looked. Now it was uncanny. It had been hundreds of years since he’d seen anyone from his own time, but now the features were unmistakeably of the future. He drank in the wave of nostalgia that washed over him and the rush of endorphins that came from the way she looked at him. Expectantly. Hopefully. Eagerly.

Jack took a breath and focused where she directed him, back on the little stone held between their six knees in the Doctor’s palm. He touched it again, picked it up and turned it in his hands. He’d worked on the Tardis before. He knew her inside and out, and they’d always understood each other. This was like a brief glimmer of his telepathic ability, amplified and redirected. It wasn’t in words, but it felt like companionship, as if it were really speaking to him without words or emotions, but in the way that machines communicated, through energy transfer and electrical pulses.

“Captain,” the Doctor said, prompting Jack out of his meditative state. “It’s a good Time Lord name.”

“But I’m not…” Jack started, then shut up. What was the Doctor telling him? The alien was difficult to understand, but he was always worth it. His long fingers were circling Jack’s knee with an intimacy he rarely expressed, at least around other people or in the middle of a mission. 

In Jack’s hands the coral was weighty, and he could feel the energy and air flowing around it. This was the power source of the Tardis, and for some reason, the Doctor had brought it here, to Torchwood. 

In her hands, Quiver was twisting the cube, and then the artifact in Jack’s hands started to grow. He gasped. As it grew heavier, whispers floated around them, and he felt his stomach drop as if in a roller coaster. He remembered technology from his own time that he’d forgotten. He heard the digital beeps and ring tones he’d grown up with, and the particular way the wind howled on the BoeShane peninsula, when a storm was brewing and whistling through the caverns. He remembered lying in the dark with Ianto, whispering to him about the time he’d crawled out of bed at night, crouched under the living compound, and watched the sea tear up the reefs and rocks around his home in a fierce storm, and how he’d crawled in bed soaked and stayed there with some sickness like pneumonia for the next 3 weeks. It was like all his memories were fusing together as he related and remembered them through time.

“Just concentrate,” Quiver urged him.

He closed his eyes and let the sensations come in. Remembered tinkering on the Tardis. The way his hands felt around her wiring. The one time he’d tried to follow the Doctor down to the heart of her to keep working. The Doctor had pushed him aside, saying it wasn’t for him to do. The time he’d taken a lover beneath the console and felt like the time travel machine herself was laughing at them in his head. 

This coral had a memory, and it already knew him. Jack felt dizzy when he finally looked up from its speckled surface, dizzy when he found the Doctor’s eyes watching him. “It’s a gift, Captain,” he said. “One day, this little bud will be a full-grown Tardis. You’ll be able to travel wherever you want. Within reason, of course.” 

Jack laughed, disbelieving, “But you’re always taking it away from me.” He held up his wrist strap, which the Doctor was always disabling every time he came around to visit.

“That one’s too dangerous,” the Doctor explained, running his thumb along his wrist where the Vortex hopper was strapped on. “You could be blasted out of existence if you look at it wrong. Besides, one day, all you have here will be gone.”

“But I won’t be? Doctor, if I survive all this, doesn’t that mean I’m living with the ancestors of my future lovers? I’ll be friends with my own great-great-greater-than-great grandchildren. Didn’t you say I’m wrong?” Jack kept laughing, although in some way he was terrified of it too. If he lived forever, wouldn’t time stop making sense at some point? His slow path through it could casually drive him mad. But if he could travel, and if he could move through it like the Doctor could, all that could change. 

“A Tardis can take millions of years to grow,” the Doctor said “We’re just helping it along.”

“I’m made wrong, but you want to give me a Tardis? All of time and space?” 

“By the time she’s matured, you’ll be ready,” the Doctor said, gently. “Who else am I going to leave this to, when I’m gone?”

“Doctor, I’m honored.” 

“Make it worthwhile, Jack. You already have time and space. All of it. But to travel through it, at whim? This is something you’ll have to live up to.” 

“Great power, great responsibility. Of course.”

Quiver looked up from her tuner and shared a smile with them. “It’s done. She’ll grow. Another few centuries.”

The Doctor reached forward, slowly, and lifted the coral from Jack’s hands. “I’ll keep her safe, for now.”

Jack felt bereft when the coral left his hands, and the whisperings of the past and future went still. He felt like he’d been given something precious, only to have it taken away again. He was still waiting on the Doctor’s approval. This little slice off the mama Tardis was still just a sniveling brat of a baby. But at least, the Doctor had given Jack a promise, like a blessing, that he’d be worthy of the honor some day, after all. 

“You’ve had your eye on me, all along,” Jack realized. “All the things it knows.”

“Oh yes!” The Doctor smiled. “It’s been stored in the archives a hundred years. Captain, you’re never alone.”

\--

 

Downstairs, Gwen and Tosh were celebrating. As Ianto swept by them, binning coke cans and capturing coffee mugs, and sweeping up the papers and research that had collected under their feet for the past few weeks, Tosh held out a cold beer bottle with condensation still covering the outside. “Take a break, Ianto. Have a beer.” 

But Ianto brushed them away. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

“He’ll be back,” Gwen reassured him. “You don’t think he’s angry with you?” 

Ianto shook his head. “That’s not how he works.” 

And it didn’t matter. There wasn’t always time to spare even when they managed to save people. Soon enough the next problem would come along. The cleaning had to be done sometime, so Ianto figured he may as well work now, when he was anxious and unsettled anyway. Jack would do what he was going to do, and it wasn’t the team he was thinking about, and none of them had a say in it anyhow.

Gwen watched Ianto shuffle away with a frown on his face, but she shook off the concern she felt and clinked her bottle against Toshiko’s. “The Doctor called you brilliant!” That really was something to celebrate. 

“It was fun,” Tosh agreed. “Only we’ve just fixed that cube, and she’s taken it again. What if the boy relapses, and we need it?”

“Perhaps she’ll stay, and make sure. And you told Quiver you were happy here,” she said and leaned forward. “Are you, Tosh?”

“Most days,” Tosh admitted with a shrug. “Before all this, before Torchwood, I had a puppy you know, and a job, and a girlfriend. And I thought we were happy. I miss them, but there are so many things we see at the very edge of reality. At the edge of the Rift.” 

“Yeah,” Gwen leaned back in her chair, smiling. “But what if you could be out in the middle of it. Out in the universe on another planet?” She let herself envision it. The waves of the beach, and a different colored sky, and brightly colored insects hopping the sand.

“Of course, but I couldn’t leave everything behind. You and Jack. Sushi. My work and my family. It would be a dishonor to them.” Toshiko nodded, as if making up her mind. “This is amazing enough. I wouldn’t ever have believed in aliens, before Torchwood.” 

Gwen took a large gulp of her beer. “I only wish Rhys understood.”

“Maybe it’s healthy. You can go home, be normal for a while every day.” 

They were quiet for a while, drinking their beers. They watched Ianto, gathering up the garbage bins and making fresh coffee. Maybe he was simply jealous, Gwen thought. When the Doctor was around, Jack’s attention seemed to wander. But Ianto’s fretting did do wonders for the state of the Hub, because it was never cleaner than when he was worried about Jack. 

Toshiko was watching him too and lowered her voice . “They took away that artifact he found, too, you know?”

“What do you suppose it’s for?” Gwen asked. That little branch hadn’t done much more than get bigger and hotter, when they’d turned on the cube. 

But her thoughts were stalled by Owen clattering up the stairs from below, where he’d been sterilizing his tools and tossing the sheets and gowns into the laundry. “Oy, you talking about me?” he asked, making a beeline toward Gwen and Toshiko and the six pack between them.

“Yes,” Gwen teased. “Talking about how useless you were this morning. The doctor needed an engineer to heal his patients.”

“Yeah, right.” Owen laughed and took the extra beer that Toshiko held out to him. He took a swig then held it up. “Good work, Tosh. Guess I owe you a thanks.” 

“You can buy me another beer tonight,” Tosh answered sweetly. “At the pub.”

“Will do,” Owen agreed. “More than earned it. Even the Doctor couldn’t do what you could.”

“Cheers,” Gwen said, and they all clinked glasses, laughed, and drank. Except for Ianto, who’d hidden himself away in the Captain’s office.


	15. Epilogue: When It's Time

When it was clear the Doctor wouldn’t stay with them, Jack led him and Quiver downstairs to where the Tardis was parked in the archives. By unspoken agreement, they avoided the main floor of the Hub. Jack wasn’t ready to face the team, with all these new thoughts and private longings swimming away in his thoughts, and the Doctor wasn’t the socializing kind either. Quiver, it seemed, was eager to head home since she’d been dragged away so abruptly.

The Doctor told him the whole harrowing tale as they plodded down the stone corridors. When they came to the file room, the Tardis was there like a bright flower standing out in a grey day, proudly parked near Ianto’s file desk. Jack stroked her doorframe and shook the Doctor’s hand, holding on to it for a minute too long as the Doctor tried to slip away inside. 

“Don’t be a stranger,” Jack said. “Will you visit soon?”

“Oh, here and there.” The Doctor winked.

After the whooshing and wailing and sonic buzz had faded, and Ianto’s room was dark and silent again with only the scatter of papers and clouds of dust in the air to show that the Tardis had been there and gone at all, Jack headed back up to the main floors of the Hub. 

He emerged looking dazed through the cog door, nearly two hours after he’d disappeared through it before. Though if you’d asked Jack himself, he might have guessed it was only 15 minutes or possibly as much as 5 hours. 

But he clamped down and swallowed away his strange thoughts and did some quick soul searching for his usual dazzling grin. He approached the team, and was pleased to see them relaxed and chatting together.

“Good work, Torchwood,” he said. “We saved two lives today!” 

“Jack, are you all right?” asked Gwen, pausing as she held a beer bottle and opener in her hands. “You look--” But wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.

“Happy?” Owen ventured. “Really, Jack, did you get some or what?”

“Oh, please, Owen, spare me your fantasies,” Jack said cheerfully, clapping him on the shoulder. Then he looked around. The Hub was spic and span. “Hey, where’s Ianto?”

“Hiding in your office, I think,” Gwen said. She tried to hand him the beer she’d just cracked opened, but Jack declined with a wave of his hand.

“Save it,” he said. “We’ll take the afternoon off. We could all use some down time.”

“Jack?” Ianto’s voice trembled over from the office, where he was hovering in the doorway. 

“Duty calls,” Jack said, and turned away. Gwen and Tosh watched, open-mouthed, as Jack hurried over. They waited for him to shout and get angry, or Ianto to break down crying but alas, no such drama occurred. The two men merely turned into the office and shut the door, leaving their teammates to speculate about what might be happening inside.

“All right, first things first,” Jack started. “I’m not leaving, so put that out of your head. Second, today we’ll go celebrate. Visit Arthur, go weevil hunting maybe?” he tried a smirk, but Ianto’s face was frowny and stony.

“Thanks, but I’ve just had a phone call,” Ianto informed him. “It’s Arthur Derbyshire. He passed this morning.” 

“What? We just saw him.” Jack said. He huffed and let Ianto reach over to touch his elbow. He’d thought he could just return after forty years and be friends with Arthur again. And he’d been too late. 

When he’d sat on the roof earlier and stared down at the coral, with the Doctor’s body warmth at his knee, and had thought of people coming and going from his life, it had been thoroughly abstract. But now, here it was. One more life, slipping through his fingers. One more lover’s eyes, he’d never see again.

But Jack found his current lover’s eyes were focused on him, blue, and young, and lost. “I’m sorry, Jack.” 

Jack leaned forward and kissed him. “I’ve got to go,” he said. Time and space were still spinning in their golden rush in front of his eyes. All those voices and faces from years past seemed nearby. And now Art was among them. He had work to do, visiting the home, making funeral arrangements. One last duty to help set Arthur free, for all the times he’d set Jack free. 

He reached for his coat but Ianto just looked quizzical. “Where?” he asked. “They’ll make the arrangements. There’s plenty in his accounts.”

“This is my fault,” Jack said, but he dropped the coat. “I lied. I told him I wasn’t an angel of death. But what if I was?” 

“Maybe he was waiting for you,” suggested Ianto. “Tied in with the Rift. When it pulled in from the other side, and that woman came through? Maybe the circle was closed.” 

Despite himself, Jack chuckled. “They say artists are cursed, but cursed by the Rift? That’s new.”

“What he had was a gift, Jack. Not a curse.” 

Jack hung up his coat, and Ianto reached for the crystal decanter off the desk, pouring its clear, strong liquid into the two waiting tumblers. Jack took one as he held it out, swirled the liquid around, and knocked it back. When the burn cleared, he looked up and watched Ianto do the same. 

The burn cleared Jack’s thoughts and he was able to put aside the coral and Arthur’s loss for a moment. There was other unfinished business here with the man beside him. “Listen,” he said, putting the glass back down, “about the Doctor. You don’t trust him.”

Ianto nodded, set his own glass down, and took another step closer with one hand on Jack’s knee. “His best interests aren’t always our own,” he said like an apology.

“He’s the Doctor. He’s a higher authority than Torchwood.” Jack tried to recall the Doctor’s words. “He said I’m going to travel again, some day. But to keep going, I have to leave everyone behind. Starting with Arthur today, I suppose.” 

Ianto trailed his fingers down a stack of files on Jack’s desk. “Must be difficult. All that grief. You share that with him.”

“Hey, I’m not leaving you,” Jack said, twining their hands together. He was glad he was a sensual man, since it was easier to focus on the present rather than the past. On love, on the feel of their bodies beside each other, rather than grief. 

“How long do you have?” 

“As long as we need,” Jack reassured him. “Hundreds of years, for you.” They leaned lightly against each other for another moment. “You invited me home last night,” Jack said eventually. “Was that a standing offer?”

“It can be.” Ianto let Jack pull him into a kiss. “We can stop by first. Pay our respects.”

“I’d like that,” Jack agreed. 

Ianto helped him settle his coat back on his shoulders—still damp from his time on the roof—and then followed him back into the main Hub, where they found the team was still chattering away quietly, if a little less coherently. Toshiko was giggling, Owen looked red-faced, and Gwen looked over at them with a little leer and a hopeful expression.   
“Have you two made up yet?”

“Oi, tea boy, we were hoping for some dramatics,” Owen complained.

“Didn’t have to,” Jack told Gwen. “Take the afternoon off, girls, before Rhys gets home.” 

“You don’t have to ask twice.” Gwen grabbed up her purse, then threaded her arm through Toshiko’s. “We’ll be drinking sake next door, if you need us.” 

“Send my love to the cute waitresses,” Jack grinned back at them. Toshiko’s cheeks colored further.

The four of them filed out, while Owen went to finish packing up his things. “I’m not staying!” he called, as the cog door shut behind them. “Bloody hell, am I the only one ready for work today?” 

He pulled out his phone, sifting through contacts, trying to think of someone to call. A whole afternoon off, with no plans, and he didn’t much feel like hitting a pub and drinking himself silly today. Something was still worrying him. 

The phone rang three times, and Owen tapped his foot nervously. “Marianne?” he said when the line clicked over. “Dr. Harper. I need to schedule a follow-up appointment, just to check on Brian. Everything okay, so far?” 

It was. She was grateful. 

“I’d like to check up on Tuesday,” Owen decided. “I’ll come to you.” She agreed with just a moment’s hesitation, and Owen grinned to himself as he went about shutting down the Hub’s systems. He could check on the boy, and make sure the mother was coping, too. Maybe she’d invite him to dinner, or he could take them out for ice cream. 

Owen whistled as he headed out the door. Things were looking up, and he was going to head out and get rip roaring drunk for the afternoon.

\--

 

The Rift had collapsed on itself, and the storm had blown out all of the windows in Quiver’s small house by the shore. The glass lay in shards across the white tile floor, and sunlight splintered over the whitewashed walls. Quiver was squatting on the tile floor and sifting through the ruins, fumbling through her tools and books, trying to sort out what she needed. 

The Doctor leaned on the doorframe, watching the sun’s shadow shift down the walls. “I should never have asked you for this,” he told her. “I’m sorry.” 

Squatting down on the floor, the scientist didn’t answer at first. She was busy painstakingly collecting her things and organizing these shards of her life. “I grew too bold,” she finally said. “I should have understood what you were asking me to do. A Lord of Time, your quest wasn’t ever going to be as simple as I thought. You are my equal, Doctor, in these things. More powerful than I knew.”

“I’ll help you rebuild,” he offered. “What can I do?”

Quiver shook her head and finally stood, surveying the ruined home she’d studied in for the last fifteen years. “Perhaps it’s time to move on. There’s no rift left to study and guard. Perhaps there’s another planet that needs my help.”

“Come with me,” he offered. “In my Tardis. All of time and space.”

“I dreamed what it might be like, to go with you,” she answered. “But isn’t it dangerous, the two of us, in one ship in the Vortex?”

“That’s half the fun. Of course, if you’d rather, I’ll take you somewhere else, somewhere safe.”

She looked around, assessing the quiet life she had led here, and the world and its travellers that she had glimpsed through her Rift. “No, Doctor,” she decided. “I want to come with you.” It was time to leave the safety of her studies behind and take some risks of her own. They could be a phenomenal pair, with the way their skills complemented each other. He knew it, too—it was glittering in his eyes, as he watched her pack the last few belongings in her duffel bag. 

She left most of her tools and books behind when she followed him back to the Tardis. As the wind blew through the shattered glass of the windows, papers fluttered over the floors. The sun set when dusk came, and the light glinted off the last glass remaining in the small room that had been her greenhouse and study. That glass case, framed in metal, and glazed with the DNA of two Time Lords and a time engineer, shone like a mirror out to the dark sea.

And an answering beacon, the last dark mirror in the sky that had once been a Lighthouse, flashed back for just a moment and then went dark, as the Rift on her planet shut for the last time.


End file.
